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Text by CHARLES MARRIOTT and “ TIS.” 


— 


A COLLECTION OF WORKS IN 
MODERN ART 


COLOUR LTD. 


~ 


Issued by “Colour Magazine’ 


B 


_ 53, VICTORIA STREET, LONDON, S.W. 


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CONTENTS. 


eae , 3 PAGE 
MODERN ART, By Cuartes Marruiorr. 


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GAL; 


MODERN ART. 


By CHARLES MARRIOTT. 


Chapter I. 
WORKING definition of art must be 


based upon art, not as it might be in 

ideal conditions, but as it is and has 

been in the history of the world. 
This needs the sacrifice of many preferences and 
prejudices, and even the temporary disregard of 
some principles. But it does not mean lowering 
the standard of criticism. On the contrary, it 
means keeping it up; that we agree to disregard 
our principles rather than tamper with them, to 
broaden our definition of art rather than flatter 
examples to make them square with it. 

There is a story of Whistler that may be used 
in illustration. Whistler was in a_hatter’s, 
having his hat ironed, when a fussy stranger, 
seeing him bareheaded, mistook him for the 
shopman. 

“T got this here yesterday,” said the stranger, 
wagegling his own hat upon his head, “ and look 
at it!” 

“Well, what’s the matter with it?” said 
Whistler. 

“Can’t you see?” said the stranger. “It 
doesn’t fit.” 

“Shouldn’t worry,” said Whistler, looking him 
up and down; “none of your clothes fit.” 

So a working definition of art will cover many 
works that are not worthy of the name; because, 
if it comes to that, very few of the others are 
really worthy of it. Not that insistence on a 
precise fit is not right and proper on occasion. 
Several excellent and stimulating books have 
been written about art outside or above the 
region of common sense, They help us to clear 
up our ideas and confirm our principles. Pro- 
bably the best, and certainly the most amusing, 
recent book about art was Azt, by Mr. Clive 
Bell. Its principles were unassailable, but they 


had the disadvantage of excluding from art 
practically everything produced within the 
Christian era. In the same way a book might 
be written about human virtue which excluded 
from the ranks of good men and women evety- 
body except the Saints of the Calendar—and a 
great many of them. Such a book might not be 
very encouraging to average persons trying to 
live a decent life in difficult circumstances, but 
the fact remains that the Calendar of Saints is 
a necessary standard of reference. It reminds 
us what goodness is humanly possible. So Mr. 
Bell’s book reminded us what art at its purest 
might mean. Also, at the time of stress in 
which it was written, it served the useful purpose 
of proving that the arguments based on prin- 
ciple against a certain movement in painting 
were foolish. The newer painting might be 
ugly, and it might be incomprehensible; but, 
when it came to esthetic principles, it was ever 
so much purer than the mass of work from which 
the accepted canons of art criticism were derived. 
Incidentally, Mr. Bell’s book, or its reception, 
brought out the interesting fact that most art 
critics praise or blame pictures for qualities 
which have nothing whatever to do with art. 
The defect of the newer painting was that it had 
everything to do with art and nothing to do with 
anything else; and so in a workaday world of 
mixed capacities for zsthetic enjoyment it was 
a counsel of perfection. 

The object of these remarks is to explain that 
the view of art adopted in these pages leaves the 
counsel of perfection unquestioned, and even 
praised—as an ideal. “ Perfection,” by the way, 
is used here of kind and not of degree, for paint- - 
ing, as practised and understood, is a mixed art, 
and not like music a pure form of expression. 
It can be, and is, used to imitate nature, convey — 
information, illustrate an incident, or tell a story. 


10 MODERN ART 


Strictly speaking, these functions have nothing 
to do with art; but for a great many people, 
including some of the most intelligent, they are 
the only purposes of pictures, and in a great 
many pictures, including some of the most skil- 
ful, they are the only apparent motives. It 
would be unreasonable and intolerant to rule out 
these people and these pictures because they 
misunderstand or obscure the true meaning of 
art. The better way is to recognise them for 
what they appreciate and perform, while stand- 
ing out for expression as the ideal. 

Here, again, the question is not unlike that of 
goodness. “All for-love” is the ideal motive of 
conduct, but in an imperfect world most of us 
have to get along with a sense of duty. There- 
fore we praise John Brown for paying his debts 
and keeping sober, while recognising that Mary 
Magdalen or Francis of Assisi was the truer type 
of goodness. All we demand is that John Brown 
should not ask us to mistake self-respect for love 
of God. So, in the same way, though “all for 
expression” is the ideal motive of art, we need 
not sniff at a reasonably good representation so 
long as it does not pretend to be something 
different. If it does, we have a right to apply 
our strictest rule of criticism and to point out that 
just as goodness does not begin until duty is lost 
in love, so art does not begifi until representation 
is forgotten as an aim. Compared with love and 
expression as motives of life and art, duty and 
representation are merely incidental. But in 
practice, and because we are all miserable 
sinners, it is better not to apply the rule gratui- 
tously. So long as we do not confuse our 
principles, it is better to take the person and the 
picture for what they are worth in an imperfect 
world. Therefore in these pages the definition of 
art is nothing more than the mass of respectable 
pictures bequeathed to us by the past and being 
produced in the present; whether they be pieces 
of pure expression, skilful imitations of nature, 
apt illustrations, or pleasing ornaments. As 
happens with the motives of human conduct, 
they are generally mixed, 

There is the same necessity for some sort of 
working definition of “modern” art. Strictly 


speaking, William Blake was a much more 
modern artist than Edouard Manet, because 
both in his conception of reality and in his use 
of paint he was much more in sympathy with 
modern ideas. Not only by religion and poetry, 
but by the critical tests of modern physical and 
psychological analysis, Blake’s conception of 
appearances as obscuring reality is becoming 
more and more securely established; and his © 
idea of paint as a substance to be used not for 
imitating something else but for its own sake as 
a means of expression is only now generally 
accepted in practice. A point that I have never 
seen dwelt on, by the way, is that it always is 
the imaginative artist who is curious about his 
materials. The prose writings of Blake are full of 
gallipots. There is no paradox in this, because 
it stands to reason that the more a man is con- 
vinced that the invisible world is the real one, 
the less inclined he will be to use his materials 
for imitating appearances. Instead, he will try 
to get out of his materials what they have to say 
about reality in their own language; and this 
demands a constant study of their properties. 
Blake’s contention that oil painting must be an 
inferior art because you could not use real gold 
and silver in it, was not only good art criticism, 
but flat common sense. All art is praise of the 
Creator by and through His creatures, of which 
gold is the most precious in man’s estimation. 
If you are to praise God in gold, it is foolish to 
degrade it for the sake of getting nearer to the 
actual appearance of sunlight on trees. As 
Ruskin pointed out, the proper way is to gild the 
leaves, as was done in early Italian frescoes and 


tempera paintings; as also by the Japanese 


screen painters. 

However, Blake died in 1827 and Manet in 
1883, and there are still painters like Mr. Sar- 
gent using paint with supreme skill for the 
imitation of appearances. Therefore in these 
pages “ modern” means, broadly, contemporary 
art, whether the belief expressed in it be the old 
superstition of realism or the more modern re- 
affirmation of reality. Convenience limits the 
word “art” to painting, and necessity to little 
more than British painting. 


MODERN ART II 


Chapter II. 


EFORE considering the art of any 
period it is as well to look round at 
the conditions that produced or shaped 
it. For art does not begin in the 

studios, and even the craftsmanship that 
embodies it is affected by many external circum- 
stances—facilities for travelling, the relative cost 
of materials, the progress of chemical discovery 
and mechanical invention, and, particularly, 
social and domestic habits. It is likely, for 
example, that the modern habit of living in flats 
will have an appreciable effect upon the form 
and size of works of art; and pictorial advertising 
has already reacted upon design and treatment 
in easel pictures. What happens in the studios 
is a reaction, immediate or delayed, to the moral 
and material conditions of surrounding life in 
general. 

The moral conditions are much the more 
important because they modify the artistic 
impulse itself. It is not necessary here to go 
deep into the nature of the artistic impulse, but 
some reference to theories about the origin of art 
will be convenient. Whether the earliest forms 
were utilitarian, decorative, illustrative, or reli- 
gious in their motive, it seems likely that all 
early art was a sort of magic. Man wanted to 
pacify his God, record an event, get power over 
beasts, or dignify his person or his cave; and he 
carved, scratched, or daubed a spell for the pur- 
pose. Observe that this leaves untouched the 
contention that the artistic impulse has no aim 
but self-satisfaction. Hunger has no other aim, 
but it invariably concerns itself with something 
to eat. Whenever art got itself materials and a 
method or methods, it became a sort of magic or 
“ medicine.” 

Now this, if true, as I believe, is enormously 
important, because the whole character of art 
depends on whether we are to regard it as pri- 
marily a logical or a magical means to an end. 
It stands to reason that a man will adopt entirely 


different methods according as he hopes to evoke 


and convey reality by description or by a spell. 
If the former, the description can hardly be too 
full and accurate; if the latter, the spell can 
hardly be too concentrated and formal. In this 
respect there is no difference between super- 
natural and natural magic; between calling up a 
spirit, or the reflection of your lover, and the 
machinery of hypnotism. A formal incantation 
is the essence of the business. What it amounts 
to, I suppose, is that the subconscious mind is 
at the mercy of rhythm. 

In practice, art has always been a compromise 
between the logical and the magical ways of try- 
ing to evoke reality. The view in favour at the 
moment, I believe, is that art has improved in 
proportion as the magical element has declined. 
If this means that art has improved in its 
secondary functions of imitation and description, 
in its appeal to the logical intelligence, it can 
hardly be denied ; and, as I shall presently try to 
show, there is a Nemesis to improvenient in that 
direction. For the moment it is enough to say 
that, broadly speaking, the successive changes 
in art have been as it swung to the magical or 
the logical. side. On the whole the magical 
tendency has been most pronounced in propor- 
tion as art has been associated with religion. 
Egyptian art and early Greek were strongly 
hieratical, and in early Christian art not only the 
subject-matter of painting, but the treatment— 
the colours of clothes and the symbolical acces- 
sories—was determined, not by the choice of the 
individual artist, but by the dogmas of the 
Church. 

It is equally true that naturalistic art and 
naturalistic religion have always gone hand in 
hand. The connection between Protestantism 
and the Dutch seventeenth-century school was 
too marked to be accidental, and it cannot be - 
denied that there was at the same time a great 
improvement both in domestic virtue and in 
realistic representation. The fair comment that 
the religion was less religious and the art less 


12 MODERN ART 


artistic need not be expanded. These changes 
in art are only touched on here because of their 
bearing on the present. 

Coming nearer to our own time, there was the 
breakaway from Classical tradition at the end of 
the eighteenth century. Here, again, there was 
at least a parallelism between the reaction in art 
and the reaction in life, of which the most 


obvious phenomenon was the French Revolu-, 


tion. By this time the religious element was 
somewhat obscured, though in England there 
was a distinct affinity between the empty for- 
malism of the Established Church and the empty 
formalism of Classical art. Observe that the 
Classical scholar of the period was also the 
divine; and in all probability the Romantic 
revival in art and the Wesleyan revival in reli- 
gion were closely connected. Wesley’s loyalty 
to the sacramental side of religion through all 
the naturalism of revival meetings might fairly 
be compared to Wordsworth’s recognition of the 
mystical element in poetry through all his prefer- 
ence for naturalistic diction. Blake, it may be 
observed, kept his head; and could paint and 
write with the simplicity of a child and the spiri- 
tual authority, the hieratical gestures, of a High 
Priest. 

The next great change, with direct conse- 
quences to the present, was that in the mid- 
nineteenth century associated with the industrial 
revival and the rise of democracy. It was not 
for nothing that Courbet was accused of helping 
to pull down the Vendéme Column, that Rossetti 
taught drawing in a working-men’s college, or 
that William Morris was a Socialist orator. On 
both sides of the Channel the gospel of “ Work ” 
was in the air. As expressed in painting by 
Courbet and Ford Madox Brown, and in litera- 
ture by Zola and Carlyle, respectively, it gives a 
very fair indication of racial differences. The 
Frenchmen excelled in objective truth, the 
Englishmen in moral reflections and deductions. 

Closely associated with and supporting these 
ideas was the enormous advance in material 


science. It was the age of things as they are— 
by the test of reasoning upon the evidence of 
the senses. This was reflected not only in the 
attitude of art to life, but in its methods. 
Realism, Naturalism, pre-Raphaelism and Im- 
pressionism, with all their differences, were all 
expressions of the same belief: that reality in 
art is to be got by objective truth to nature. © 
The belief, or the superstition, was backed for all 
it was worth by the men of science, and Huxley 
and Pasteur were as much apostles of realism as 
were Zola and Bastien-Lepage. In art, how- 
ever, the Englishmen were more or less half- 
hearted in their pursuit of reality through 
The very word “pre-Raphaelism ” 
covers a compromise. The apostles of the 
movement were determined to be true to nature 
in the objective sense, but they could not get rid 
of their instinctive liking for pure colour and 
decorative design; their subconscious faith in 
magic; and so they harked back to a period in 
which fidelity to nature in the objective sense 
and magic of colour and design seemed to be” 
combined. There is a similar half-heartedness 
in the writings of such men as Tennyson and 
Kingsley. Tennyson marches boldly up to a 
nature “red in tooth and claw,” and then recoils 
into a “ somehow good.” 

But it was left to an American to attempt the 
most amusing compromise with realism. The 
art of Whistler was the art of painting nature 
“in the dusk with the light behind her.” Essen- 
tially realistic in its attitude, it shirked the full 


realism. 


‘consequences of realism and sought relief in 


graceful evasions, and softened the truth by 
speaking in undertones. Whistler never stood 
up to nature and tried to find the reality behind 
the appearance. His conception of art was 
rather to conceal the truth. It implied that 
nature was a plain person who, nevertheless, 
looked well in certain lights, moods, and condi- 
tions, and best of all when she looked like some- 
body or something else. The business of the 
artist was to find these lights, moods, and condi- 


MODERN ART 13 


tions. That Whistler had a genius for finding 
them nobody would deny, nor that he had 
supreme skill in suggesting them when found; 
but the effect must happen, or seem to happen. 
Design must never be obtruded. Thus, though 
the pictures of Whistler are superficially like the 
paintings of the Chinese and Japanese in form, 
nothing could be less like them in spirit. 
Whistler tried to make look natural what the 
Eastern painters frankly owned as a convention. 
A Chinese painting is a formal design, and every 
touch in it is part of an elaborate ritual. When 
all is said, Whistler was a master of slightness. 
It was not the difficulties of craftsmanship that 
he evaded, but the difficulties of interpretation. 
His little etchings and pastel drawings are better 
than his large oil paintings, because the art of 
evasion is only satisfying on a small scale and in 
a slight medium. 


It was more than an accident that Whistler 
was an American. There seems to be some- 
thing in the American mind that shrinks away 
from reality and takes refuge in sentimental 
evasions or juggling with those misleading 
deductions of our bodily senses that are called 
facts. The often observed segregation of the 
sexes in American social life, and the pheno- 
menon of “nature faking,” are cases in point. 
In America the social graces are a veil flung over 
the harsh realities of life, and not an imaginative, 
though formal, interpretation of them as they 
must be in every society that is not merely 
“Society.” As for the second, it is indeed 
remarkable that the nation of “Uncle Remus” 
should fail to see that the fable, with its frank 
conventions, is a much truer interpretation of 
animal life than the life history in terms of human 
psychology. 

But this may be thought a digression. To get 
back to art, it is right and proper that Mr. Joseph 
Pennell should be not only a loyal disciple, but a 
countryman of Whistler. Mr. Pennell loves 
drawing factories; but, when it comes to the 


point, the highest artistic compliment he can 
pay to a factory is to say that it looks like a 
cathedral. It never seems to occur to him that 
the only true compliment, artistic or otherwise, 
you can pay to a factory is to say that it looks 
like a factory, and to make it so. 


It is all very well to poke fun at the “ wallness 
of the wall” and the “treeness of the tree,” but 
there never was any great art which did not 
insist on the essential and permanent character 
of things in so far as it could be apprehended by 
the full consent of all human faculties according 
to the full knowledge of the period. Whistler’s 
gibe at the artist who, wishing to paint a line of 
poplars in the dusk on the further bank of the 
river, would first row across in a boat in broad 
daylight to see what they were like, was a con- 
fession of artistic cowardice. No great artist 
was ever afraid that the impressions of his eye 
would be disturbed by the knowledge of his 
mind. What it amounts to is that the realist is 
afraid of seeing too much. In order to keep his 
vision artistic, he has to cultivate short-sighted- 
ness. 

Art at the close of the nineteenth century, 
with all its merits, presents the spectacle of a 
series of ingenious attempts to escape from the 
logic of realism. While this was going on in 
the studios the progress of material science was 
solving the problem in. another way. The 
Nemesis to improvement in accurate representa- 
tion was close at hand. But that must wait for 
another chapter. What remains here is to say 
that this hasty survey of artistic movements does 
not pretend to be anything more than a series of 
assertions. The object is to encourage people 
to think out the problems for themselves, to 
recognise that not merely in the subjects it repre- 
sents, but in its methods and aims, art is an 
expression of life, reflecting, though often 
obscurely, all the moral and material peculiarities 
of its own period. 


14 MODERN 


Chapter II], 


HE great discovery of the twentieth 
century was that things are not what 
they seem. An inevitable conse- 
quence was a reaction from Impres- 

sionism in painting, because Impressionism 
swore by appearances. The discovery was not 
a new one; it had always been the common talk 
of religion, philosophy, and poetry; but now for 
the first time it was confirmed by the plodding 
methods of science itself. Critical research into 
the intimate constitution of matter and explora- 
tion of the human mind by psychological 
experiment both arrived at the same conclusion: 
that what we call facts are only convenient 
fancies for dealing with the mystery of life. 
Consequently the distinctions between religious, 
poetical, and scientific truth ceased to exist; 
though religion, poetry, and science might still 
employ their own methods of expressing the 
truth. As a matter of fact, each was left freer 
than before to go its own way, because there was 
no longer any need to consider the susceptti- 
bilities of the others; to make religion a little 
less religious and science a little less scientific 
for the sake of tolerance. “ Reconciliation 
between Religion and Science” is now a mean- 
ingless phrase. It is only when you distinguish 
clearly between truth and accuracy that you can 
apply them without reserve or compromise. 
Neither in life nor art did the discovery result 
in an immediate revolution in practice. What 
happened was that, continuing to do things more 
or less in the same way, we turned our faces in 
another direction. The notion of unchanging 
elements with definite atomic weights remained 
valid for most of the practical purposes of 
chemistry ; but it could no longer be accepted as 
a complete and exhaustive explanation of the 
material universe. Reason continued to be a 
useful guide in the practical affairs of life; but, 
though the latest, it could no longer be con- 
sidered the last word in human consciousness or 


changes in their attitude. 


ART mt 


the most important. Art still continued to make 
use of appearances as convenient symbols of 
reality; but it began to make use of them with 
a difference; as temporary substitutes for truth 
with no special sanctity in themselves. In art, 
as in life, the facts of appearance remained pretty 
much the same; but they had a different bear- 
ing. Their practical value to the painter was 
enhanced rather than otherwise by the conviction 
that they were not reality; as a shipwrecked 
crew on a desert island might value bits and 
scraps and observe regulations that had no 
special value or sanctity in ordinary life. 

The working of the conviction in human con- 
sciousness had some queer effects. As might 
have been expected, religious persons, philoso- 
phers, and poets, to whom the truer conception 
of reality was familiar, kept their heads; but 
some of the others jumped to conclusions. 
They were in a great hurry to realise the new 
ideals in life and art; they wanted to throw away 
the bits and scraps and regulations all at once. 
All sorts of old intellectual fallacies were 
revived in such forms as Christian Science, 
crystal gazing, and Esoteric Buddhism; and in 
social and political affairs all sorts of short cuts 
to the millennium, such as free-love and Pro- 
tection, were proposed. In art there were all 
the attempted short cuts to reality that may be 
grouped together under the general name of 
Post-Impressionism. 

But before considering Post-Impressionism 
we must consider something else that, independ- 


ently of moral causes, prepared the way for it. 


That was the invention and rapid improvement 
of photography, the Nemesis to improvement 
in accurate representation of appearances “ by 
hand.” In the whole history of art there is 
nothing more amusing than the attitude of 
painters to photography, and the successive 
At first they said that 
it was not true. What they meant was that there 
were certain mechanical defects in photography, 
or rather certain optical differences between the 


MODERN ART 1s 


photographic lens and the human eye. The 
obvious fact that the ordinary photograph 
represents a one-eyed view of nature, the entire 
inability of the earlier photographers to reproduce 
colour, and the uneven response of silver salts 
to the spectrum—resulting in perversions of 
tone—were other defects of photography that 
gave courage to the painters. 

The improvement and correction of lenses in 
the direction of human optics, the application of 
the stereoscopic principle, the discovery of a 
means to reproduce colour, and the rectification 
of tone-values by means of a light filter or screen 
queered the pitch again; and the painters fell 
back on vague talk about “selection.” ‘The 
camera could not select. Then came along Mr. 
Muybridge with his instantaneous photographs 
of jumping horses. The engagingly awkward 
attitudes revealed and their superficial affinity 
to the work of Japanese animal draughtsmen, 
then coming into fashion, confused the issue and 
intrigued the painters enormously. If the camera 
could not select in space, it could select in time 
with a celerity and precision beyond the power 
of any human eye, and the results had all the 
appeal of novelty. Less reflective painters 
began to educate their eyes on the lines of 
photographic vision, and the fashion in snap- 
shot drawing survives to this day. The final 
conclusion seemed to be that photography was 
true, but that for the purposes of art all truth 
must be diluted with temperament. It was 
about this time that painters began to talk 
seriously about their personalities. A sort of 
working compromise between painting and 
photography was arrived at. Concessions were 
made on both sides; eminent painters did not 
disdain to take hints from photography, photo- 
graphers prejudiced their legitimate art with 
reference to painting, and, with equal justice on 
the same grounds, claimed to express their 
personalities also. _ 

Of course, it was all a to-do about nothing. 
There is no distinction whatever between artistic 


truth and plain truth, but the distinction between 
truth and accuracy is vital. Photography is 
neither true nor untrue; it is only capable of 
accuracy. Except in choice or arrangement of 
subject and conditions, you can only express 
your personality in photography in the sense in 
which you might be said to express it by errors 
in arithmetic. Painting, on the other hand, has 
nothing whatever to do with accuracy, but every- 
thing to do with truth. So long as painting 
identifies itself with accurate representation of 
appearances it is, if not in fact at any rate in 
possibility, hopelessly outclassed by the camera. 
The moment the painter regards appearances 
as merely symbols of a reality conceived by his 
mind, he is out of range of any camera that can 
ever be invented. 

This seems to lead us up to the insoluble 
problem, “What is truth?” But the solution 
need not even be attempted, Truth for the indi- 
vidual is what he believes in with all his heart; 
using that old-fashioned word for the sum of 
all his faculties, conscious and unconscious. 
Observe that this leaves the existence of absolute 
truth unquestioned. We _ shall apprehend 
absolute truth when we shall have reached our 
absolute heart, which is God. For the moment 
we have to get along with such measure of truth 
as our imperfect hearts allow us to conceive. 
But in art, at any rate, we must make use of the 
whole conception; the harvest of the mind as 
well as the gleanings of the eye as an optical 
instrument. The man who tries to limit himself 
to the latter abandons truth, in the human sense, 
without attaining accuracy, in the mechanical 
sense. On its own ground he is easily beaten 
by the machine. 

Wilfully to reject the gleanings of the eye is 
as prejudicial to truth as to accept them alone as 
evidence. It is not the choice or refusal of 
appearances that determines the esthetic value 
of painting, but the choice between truth and 
accuracy in representing them, Briefly, the 
mistake of Impressionism was that it switched 


George Clausen, R.A. 
| “ Kitty” he iy ll 


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STUDY in simplicity by a great painter, Observe the 

gradation of handling, in which the quality of paint 
is preserved throughout, although the different textures 
are sufficiently indicated. The black ribbon plays its part ines | he ai 
in the design by tone as well as by shape and position, If fe 
you cover it up, it is as if a note were missing from a taal 4 
scale, Yet with all this considered art, nothing is lost of | 
the essential simplicity of the subject. | 


Ant 


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lif lit 


Plate I. 


“The Death ey : 

A LEGITIMATE ‘variation of the famous ncuiee! by 
Piero di Cosimo, by a painter who alternates ‘between — 
iho water-colours of architecture in sunlight | and ae 
delicate pre- -Raphaelism reproduced here, pA: 

the original is revived with great sincerity. 3 


ie) j KS NMEA a 


: Henan : 
_ ANvERsTy oF. ILLINOIS 


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Gerald : Moira 


“A Decoration” 


HIS excellent painting well: deserves its title. It is 
obviously the work of a man who understands the 
principles and conditions of mural decoration. Nothing — 
is lost of the “ story ** element, of the subject interest, and — 
the landscape background is in perfect harmony with the i 
occasion ; and yet, with all these pictorial qualities, the | f 
essential character of the wall is preserved, and an. 
architectural setting ae eg) ronson the Desens 


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Plate III. 


“Ladies at Rayne” 


A CHARACTERISTIC ork by an artist whet ‘may. be ; 
said to. have leapt into fame _ with a single water- ae 
-colour—* Juno in London,”’ in the Academy of. 1913, ‘at } 
shows the typical “ae painter,” willing to sacrifice every- nf 
thing that might hinder the free play of his medium, i, 


OF age 


=H MATT AN mA ATTTM 


ARTA TA 


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Plate IV. 


“Exhibited at the Goupit Gattries 


i. : 4 aie tne 


HE general ats of Mek ‘Steer have some affinity with 
those of Turner in his later works, — ‘They consist in 
distilling from naturalistic vision its. purely zesthetic 
elements and making the picture of them, Everything is 
translated into terms of Salating, 1 but without ae obvious 
alteration of the facts of anche, . ; 


i) 


” 


Plate V. 


2 an AAT Ao ||| 
ae sili ir ae 


“Green Bird” 
THE aim of the artist, here, has been to make a design 3 A 
~ in pure colour, as for stained-glass, but at the same 
_time to preserve the characteristic handling of DAE Ae 


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Plate VI. 


/“ Agapanthus 


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é 23 2a | APART fron its excellent holon this picture ie interesting 
Hs, She Fb as an attempt to intensify reality by simplification 
: api ar and a very slight formality of treatment. The result is i — 
much firmer than if all the. minor accidents of contour rand R 
tone AD been reproduced, rt . 


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Plate VII. 


A. Palmer 


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PRIMARILY a Setudy in colour, this picture Gleb: shows 
that pastel is capable of firm treatment in competent 


hands, 


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Plate VIIL 


4 


MODERN ART 


off, or tried to switch off, everything but optical 
vision; the mistake of Post-Impressionism was 
that it switched off, or tried to switch off, every- 
thing but intuition. Both, while producing many 
interesting works, failed in their aim. In his 
prismatic analysis of light the Impressionist was, 
after all, painting from the memory of scientific 
researches, and not what he saw with his bodily 
eyes, and from his most abstract invention the 
Post-Impressionist could hardly keep out some 
hint of appearances. 

As compared with the deeper, steadier and 
less conscious working of the time-spirit in 
contemporary art the phenomenon of Post- 
Impressionism is not unlike that of Christian 
Science. They are hasty reactions from the 
fallacies of realism and materialism respectively. 
There is nothing in Post-Impressionism that is 
not contained implicitly in the body of earlier 
painting, and there is nothing in Christian 
Science that is not contained implicitly in the 
body of earlier religious belief; but in each case 
there is complete isolation of certain truths from 
all the others in disregard of human faculty and 
practice. The truths are undeniable in them- 
selves, but they are presented in a form too 
“neat” for truthful application. One might 
almost say that the moment a truth is stated 
explicitly it becomes untrue. It is not so much 
that Post-Impressionism is untrue to art, or that 
Christfan Science is untrue to Christianity or to 
Science, as that both are untrue to human 
nature; and it is because they cannot be 
completely translated into practice in every 
emergency that both lend themselves to 
charlatanism. With all our new intimations of 
immortality we have not yet reached a stage in 
which we can afford to throw away our bits and 
scraps of fact and appearance and the rules and 
regulations that proceed from their convenient 
use and application. Faith will remove moun- 
tains, but for a molehill in your back garden it 
is better to use a shovel. Art is the expression 
of reality, but until we shall see God face to face 


wf | 
it is wiser to pay some attention to His garment. 

Still, with the discovery confirmed that things 
are not what they seem, and imitative painting 
made a blind-alley occupation by photography, 
something like Post-Impressionism was bound 
to happen. And, with all its extravagancies, 
Post-Impressionism does point the general 
direction in which painting will probably 
develop. It is an overstatement in painting 
of ideas that are now familiar in most other 
departments of life. 

If then, you will say, the proper concern of 
painting is the representation of appearances in 
the spirit of truth and not of accuracy, what 
modifications of appearance may the painter 
allow himself? What distance shall he paint 
from nature, so to speak? It is all very well to 
say that he should paint the thing as he feels it 
with all his heart, but feeling is a vague and 
flexible mould for concrete images. You may 
feel a sunset as a pain in the stomach. How 
are you going to paint that? 

The question is a fair one, and any attempted 
answer must be subject to all the differences of 
human personality. But there is one very 
profitable field of inquiry—the nature of the 
stuff. Painting is, after all, the art of using 
paint; and in the decision of what is truth in art 
paint should have at least as large a voice as the 
object represented. When we ask what is truth 
in life, whatever the subject under discussion, 
we expect the answer to be given in terms of 
human nature and possibility. The trouble is 
that, as a witness for truth, paint—or at any rate — 
oil paint—is venal. It lends itself with fatal 
facility to that form of imitation which by 
sincerely flattering appearances obscures reality. 

Let us consider for a moment some other form 
of art in which the materials used are strongly 
characteristic and comparatively stubborn. 
Stained-glass, for example, Apart from the 
difficulty of cutting glass to a closely realistic 
outline, any undue effort in the direction of 
realistic imitation results in a degradation of 


18 MODERN ART 


quality so obvious that a child can see that it is 
bad art. The result may be true to the subject 
represented, but it is not true to the material. 
Apart from any question of beauty, it is not real. 
Probably, in the last resort, that is where reality 
differs from realism. In life a person may 
behave correctly according to the situation in 
which he finds himself, but if he behaves out of 
character we say that his behaviour is unreal. 
So in the same way reality in art demands not 
only the full reaction of the artist to the sub- 
ject as he conceives it, but full and characteristic 
expression of the materials employed. If you 
went through all the materials used in art, from 
stone to pastel, you would find that the effect of 
reality depended a good déal upon the modifica- 
tions of appearance, differing with each material, 
determined by their characters. In order to 
seem real the same subject would have to be 
treated differently accordingly as it was carried 
out in stone or bronze or needlework or paint. 
And, speaking broadly, the modifications would 
have to be greatest in proportion to the intract- 
ability of the material. It is remarkable how 
extreme they may be without destroying the 
effect of reality so long as they are dictated by 
the character of the material. The material 
becomes transparent, so to speak, and you see 
not it but the subject intended, though it may 
be very little “like” in the optical sense. On 
the other hand, the effect of unreality when a 
material is used out of character is due mainly 
to the material itself getting in the way. You 
become conscious of the stuff as you would not 
if it were used properly. 

All this, of course, is only another way of 


saying that a translation must be complete and. 


perfect if you are not to be more conscious of 
the language than of the meaning conveyed. 
Now, in spite of its facility, even oil paint has 
its limitations. For one thing, if a man use it 
for imitative ends he must sacrifice all freedom 
of handling. In practice he cannot get any 
nearer to the appearances of nature than is indi- 


cated by the character of brushwork without his 
paint getting in the way; and the reason why 
many pictures look “painty” is not that the 
paint is laid on too thickly or roughly, but that 
the treatment is too literal. Once let the 
imitative aim be abandoned and the brushwork 
can be as free and pronounced as you like 
without destroying the effect of reality. 

On the other hand, there is a limit to the 


degree in which oil painting can disregard the - 


appearances of nature. Ojl paint is not a 
substance that will “stand alone ”—like stone, 
for example. The roughest hewing of a block 
of stone is enough to suggest the image of a 
man, because the block itself will do the rest. 
But with paint you must have something to 
spread it on, and you cannot let the patch of 
paint just leave off as you could the block of 
stone. You must have some form to contain it. 
If you reject the forms of nature you must 
invent other forms, perhaps geometrical forms ; 
and then the onus of reality is put upon your 
invention, whether or not it really conveys any- 
thing to your fellow creatures. So that between 
the check on imitation caused by its character 
and consistency and the check on undue 
abstraction caused by its inability to stand 
alone, the characteristic use of all paint, for all 
its facility, is kept within reasonable bounds. 
There is another check upon the imitative 
misuse of oil paint besides its consistency, and 
that is colour itself. Human nature demands 
colour, but the craving can only be indulged 
with safety if the paint is used properly. Why 
is it that the colours in an Academy picture 
often look too bright, not to say gaudy, while 
the colours in a monkish illumination do not, 
though comparison would show them to be 
actually brighter? Because in the illumination 
the colours are combined with a formal style of 
drawing. Both drawing and colour are, so to 
speak, at the same remove from nature. There 
is no discrepancy between them, and therefore 
no effect of unreality. In the Academy picture 


ee a. 


—— 


MODERN ART 19 


the bright colours are combined with a style of 
drawing which closely imitates the appearances 
of nature, and therefore they look too bright. 
The artist may tell you that he “saw” the 
colours like that. What he means is that he 
felt them like that, but had not the courage to 
feel form in the same way. He, quite properly, 
translated the element of colour into terms of 
painting, but did not at the same time translate 
the element of form. His colour and his form 
are at different removes from nature, and so the 
effect is unpleasant and unreal. 

The real answer to the question, “What 
modifications of appearance may the painter 
allow himself, what distance shall he paint from 
nature?” is contained in the paint-pot; in the 
consistency of paint and in the intrinsic appeal 
of pure colour. At the risk of being tedious I 
have dwelt at length on these points because 
of their bearing on modern art. For one reason 
or another—the confirmed discovery in every 
department of life that things are not what they 
seem, the substitution of reality for realism as 
an aim, the keener inquiry into the nature of 
things themselves, or the cornering of accuracy 
by photography—painters have been driven 
back to their paint-pots to find their inspiration, 
or part of their inspiration, there. I do not 
mean that they have reasoned it out consciously 
for themselves, but that by a dozen little imper- 
ceptible pulls and pushes modern art is being 
shepherded into the way it should go. 


Chapter IV. 


HOTOGRAPHY, which threatened to 
queer the pitch of painting, has helped 
it in more ways than one. In one of 
them the parent publication of this 

volume, the magazine Colour, may claim an 
important and honourable share. 
art of reproduction in colour. 


I mean the 
In turning over 


the pages of this collection it cannot have 
escaped an acute observer that, on the whole, 
those pictures come out best in which there is a 
definite and well-articulated design, and in which 
the colouring is frank and relatively flat. Of 
course, the comparative inferiority of some of 
the others might be put down to mechanical 
defects in the process of reproduction, but a 
picture is subject to similar accidents in the 
circumstances of life. Unless the design be 
firm and well-knit, and the colouring reasonably 
flat, a picture must be hung in a carefully 
selected light and looked at only from a chosen 
distance. Everything else being equal, it is 
fair to say that the best picture is that which will 
survive the greatest number of accidents of 
position and lighting in the living-room; so that 
in the end it comes true that one test of a picture 
is suitability for mechanical reproduction. A 
French painter, whose name [| forget, meant 
the same thing when he said: “I want to design 
my pictures so that a house-painter could paint 
them.” It is true that there is a beauty of 
handling which distinguishes the work of the 
artist from that of the house-painter, but that is 
not lost in photographic reproduction, as any- 
body can see who will look at the pictures in 
this volume. What suffers in photographic 
reproduction is the superficial charm, depending 
on tricky modulation, which might be compared 
to beauté du diable in a woman. 

In the whole history of art I know of nothing 
more beautiful than this double service of 
photography. On the one hand it has made | 
imitative painting a blind-alley occupation by 
showing that it can be done better by machinery, 
and on the other it has put a premium on good 
design and clear and simple statement by loyally 
reproducing them. By discouragement in one 
direction and encouragement in another it has 
defined the true province of painting better than 
volumes of argument. 

Another thing that has had a great and 
beneficial influence on painting is pictorial 


20 MODERN ART 


advertising by means of posters. For one thing 
it has rehabilitated the wall. The circumstances 
of modern life do not yet conduce to a great 
revival of mural painting, the ideal, as it was 
the earliest, form of pictorial art in Western 
Europe; but there is no reason why the framed 
easel picture should not be designed for its 
place on the wall. There could not be a falser 
idea of pictures than that illustrated in genre 
paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth 
centuries, in which a periwigged connoisseur 1s 
shown peering at a corner of a painting on an 
easel through a magnifying glass. One does 
not know whether to be glad or sorry that this 
view still survives in the sale-room. On the 
whole, perhaps, it is as well that the dealer 
should be encouraged to think of all works of 
art as a sort of “curios,” so that painting as an 
expression of life and a grace to living may be 
freed from his attentions. 

The proper place for a picture is on the wall, 
where its presence can be felt in all the ordinary 
occupations of the home. ‘There can be no 
doubt that by decorating walls and hoardings 
posters have unconsciously confirmed the habit 
of looking in the right direction and with the 
right sort of attention—as for passing refresh- 
ment in the affairs of life—for pictures. But, 
apart from that, posters have had a direct 
influence upon the methods of painting. Not 
only by practice, since many painters design 
them, but by example, since everybody is ex- 
posed to them whether he will or not, they are 
constantly asserting the importance of design 
and of that simplicity and clearness of treatment 
which enables a picture to “carry” equally well 
at any reasonable distance. 


There is yet another way in which both | 


photographic reproduction and posters have 
affected painting for the good. That is by the 
limitations in range and quality of the colours 
used in printing. Artists often complain 
bitterly of this. They say: “Oh, but you 
should have seen the original!” If the design 


was made for reproduction, the complaint is 
about as reasonable as would be that of a writer 
whose manuscript was too subtle for type, or a 
composer whose work was out of range of the 
instruments. It is the duty of every creative 
artist not merely to know but to use the limita- 
tions of the medium in which his work will 


finally appear. The good dramatist, for. 


example, will make artistic use of the defects 
of the actor-manager for whom he writes his 
play. Personally, I could never understand 
why posters are not designed in the inks in 
which they are to be printed. 

You may say that the limitations cannot have 
any effect upon pictures not painted for repro- 
duction, but there is evidence in the history of 
water-colour that they can. The good tradition 
of water-colour in England owes a great deal 
to the fact that many of the early water-colourists 
worked for reproduction in aquatint. If their 
drawings were to come out well they had to be 
kept broad and simple, firmly designed, and 
carried out in a few flat tones. Not every 
drawing was made for reproduction, but the 
virtue became a habit where the necessity did 
not exist and remained after it had gone; and 
it is noticeable that the more recent development 
of water-colour is a return to the earlier manner 
after a period of licence in the extended 
resources of the colour-box—rather like what is 
said to happen to the apprentice to the confec- 
tionery business. Again, there can be no 
question that the illustrators of the “sixties” 


- owed a great deal to their discipline by the 


wood-engravers. 

So in the same way, though posters are not 
generally designed in oils, nor is every picture 
painted for reproduction, the limitations of 
process-printing have reacted favourably upon 
painting in general. Both artists and the 


public have become familiar with the virtue of 


simplicity and the good effect of a definite colour- 
scheme. 
Not that the glorious fulness and freedom 


ats, 


MODERN 


possible in oil painting is a thing to be 
regretted in itself. But freedom brings its own 
dangers, and, in art as in life, without a strong 
sense of responsibility some external restraint 
is not a bad thing in all matters where facility is 
the danger. And it is fatally easy, much easier 
than in water-colour, to misuse oil paint for 
imitative purposes. On the whole, and particu- 
larly in England, where there is no very stern 
tradition of technique, it is a good thing for art 
that colour-printing continues to fall short of 
the full possibilities of oil painting. It is quite 
certain that these limitations would have no effect 
if they were not in the general direction in which 
art is developing. 

I have hammered at these points because in 
most books about art the question of the material 
receives far too little attention. It seems to be 
assumed that the artist—painter, sculptor, or 
engraver—makes his design “in the air,” and 
then proceeds to execute it with anything that 
comes handy. All the best works of art are con- 
ceived and designed in the material in a form 
dictated by its nature, and very often the material 
rather than the subject is the real inspiration. 
And, if you will think over the general meaning 
of the word “conception,” nothing could be more 
natural. Every living thing, and a work of art 
is a living thing, is conceived in the substance in 
which it is to be born; and life does not suffer if 
substance rather than offspring inspire the crea- 
tive act. 

I have a strong suspicion that many of the 
earlier paintings, done at a time when painting 
materials were hard to come by and uncertain in 
quality, owe their characteristic beauty to the 
fact that the artist happened to have a good 
sample of a particular colour, and wanted to 
make the most of it. The subject, and in many 
cases the general treatment, was decided by the 
patron or by tradition, and so the most personal 
element in the whole business was the ingenuity 
expended in using the subject to show off the 
stuff. 


ART : 21 


A personal experience brought home this point 
of view to me very strongly some years ago. 
I was painting stage scenery at a lunatic asylum, 
when the company assembled for rehearsal. 
Amongst them was a music-hall artist, a patient, 
well enough to take a minor part in the perform- 
ance, and extremely useful to us on account of 
his professional experience. Standing below the 
ladder upon which I was at work, he made one 
or two critical remarks. “If I were the guv’nor,” 
he said, “I should say: ‘I don’t mind buying 
your paints, but you'll have to spread them about 
a bit more.’” 

We had a good stage, but the arrangements 
for scene-painting were rather primitive, and 
standing on a ladder with your head in close 
proximity to a flaring gas “ batten ” and a bucket 
hanging on your left arm, dabbing at a swaying 
canvas with a “ pound” brush, after-an exacting 
day’s work of another kind, is conducive to 
patchiness rather than real breadth of effect. At 
the moment I was rather nettled, but when I had 
had time to think it over it seemed to me a very 
good criticism. 

After all, painting comes out of the paint-pot, 
and though “spreading it about” is rather a 
crude way of doing justice to paint, it is at least 
a recognition of its existence as a material. In 
a rough-and-ready way, too, it does describe the 
quality of breadth as distinct from covering a 
large surface in painting. But “spreading it 
about” means something more than either 
breadth or making the most of it in quantity; 
and, if the professional view of stage “ proper- 
ties” is a guide, I think it meant something more 
to my critic. It meant giving the paint a show 
as paint, apart from any representation that it was 
called upon to perform. 

It is necessary to discriminate here between 
giving the paint a show as paint and letting it 
get in the way of representation; and I do not 
think that the distinction is too fine. The intrin- 
sic quality of a material may be brought out and 
enjoyed separately without any prejudice to 


22 MODERN 


reality in the representation. Nothing could be 
more like a real horse than a Chinese horse of 
It is defec- 
tive translation that prejudices reality. We love 
and admire the English of the Bible as English 
without losing the sense of the words. As a 
matter of fact, it is when a translation is too close 
to the original, in the idiomatic sense, that reality 
is disturbed by the language. 
thing happens when a material of art is used to 


jade, and yet the jade is very jade. 


Exactly the same 


imitate the appearances of nature, unless the 
imitation be so close that there is no translation 
at all—which is wax-works. 

Giving the material a show, though present in 
all good art, seems to me peculiarly characteristic 
of modern painting. Closely associated with it 
Here 
there is a remarkable parallel between modern 
It has become a truism 
that all social and political ideals must be based 


is the renewed appreciation of design. 
art and modern life. 


upon human nature; it is equally true that all 
artistic designs must be based upon the nature 
of the substances employed. Good design, 
in fact, whether political or artistic, implies 
not only expression of the ideal or conception, 
but expression of the people or substances 
in whom or which it is to be carried out. 
Anything short of that is exploitation, and we are 
coming to see that exploitation, no matter how 
lofty the purpose may seem, is the greatest crime 
in the world. We feel that we must not “use” 
anything or anybody, no matter for what pur- 
pose, without a due regard for their wishes and 
character. That is the real meaning of the 
present war. The ideal of Bismarck was not 
without a certain grandeur in the abstract, but it 
could only be applied at the cost of human 
nature, and sooner or later humanity was bound 
to turn against it. In the last resort the rights of 
small nationalities means nothing more than their 
full expression. 


It is not suggested, of course, that the more 


ART 


expressive tendency of modern painting is due to 
deliberate thinking on the part of painters. What 
happens in any period is that by a combination 
of causes, moral and material, and including what 
may be called accidents, the creative impulse is 
guided into certain channels; checked here, en- 
couraged there, so that in the long run art is a 


reflection of its age in another and a deeper sense 


than that shown by choice of subject-matter. 
The attempt here has been to show some of 
the causes that have influenced contemporary 


art. Of these the most important, though not 


necessarily the most consciously perceived, are 
the general reaction against materialism and the 
exploitation of people and things that it implied, 
and the rapid perfection of photography. With 
a truer conception of reality as not necessarily 
evident to the eye but residing in the nature of 
things, and a mechanical means of realistic repre- 
sentation, the tendency to expression in painting 
was bound to be confirmed. Post-Impressionism 
was nothing more than a panic plunge into pure 
expression, and the best corrective is a strong 
hold upon the nature of paint. 

In practice, and without thinking it out, this is 
what the best painters have done in all ages. 
They have based their art in reality as conceived 
by their minds, but they have used appearances 
to embody their conceptions for the understand- 
ing of their fellow creatures. The conception of 
reality has varied with the general belief of the 
age and the particular insight or imagination of 
the individual, and so has the degree of trust in 
appearances. A man of keen senses and weak 
spiritual sensibility will naturally paint closer to 
nature in the And if you 
examine the works of good painters who have 
aimed more directly at reality, you will find that 
they have tended to throw the onus of truth on 
design and the intrinsic qualities of their 
materials rather than on optical fidelity to facts. 
They have regarded the facts themselves as of 


imitative sense. 


pak 


ef i 
7 . 


MODERN ART 23 


less importance than their arrangement, and in 
restating the facts in another material they have 
been very careful of the translation. Moreover, 
imagination and insight being equal, the best 
painters have allowed the nature of the material 
—the idiom of its language—to influence not 
only their translation of the facts, but the charac- 
ter of their design. They have got their design 
not only out of their conception of reality, but 
out of the stuff. 

What it amounts to is nothing more than 
instinctive belief in the magical element in art. 
Design is a spell; and as the words of a spell 
have a potency beyond their dictionary meanings, 
so the imaginative painter will feel instinctively 
that his materials have a power to evoke reality 
quite apart from their capacity for representation. 
His aim will be not so much to represent appear- 
ances with paint as to translate appearances into 
terms of paint. 

The fear of disrespect to nature by empha- 
sising design is groundless. 
sanctity in the look of things. If aman be true 
to paint, he will in the long run be true to nature ; 
and in painting, as in life, undue regard for 
appearances often goes with small respect for 
reality. It is often said that an artist has 
imposed an arbitrary design upon nature. Much 
more probably he has imposed an arbitrary 
design upon his materials. The things of nature 
can be arranged a hundred ways without any 
prejudice to reality ; but the least violation of the 


There is no special 


nature of things destroys reality to that extent. 


You cannot separate art from craftsmanship, and 
form cannot be dissociated from substance, 
though it may bear little apparent relation to the 
look of the subject represented; and it is impos- 
sible to imitate in one substance the form of 
another without some sin against the nature of 
things. The tendency of modern painting might 
be described as the effort to establish a closer 
identity between form and substance. 


Chapter V. 


O consideration of the influences upon 
modern art would be complete with- 
out some reference to the new 
inspiration from the East. I have 

often thought that the zsthetic sensibility of any 
period could be gauged by its attitude to 
Chinese art. The eighteenth century saw 
nothing in Chinese art but quaintness. Our 
forefathers accepted the pagoda as its most 
characteristic feature, and greatly preferred the 
Delft imitations of Chinese porcelain to the 
original pieces. By the middle of the nineteenth 
century the Western world had waked up to the 
fact that the Chinese and Japanese did know 
something about decorative design; but it was 
the decorative, and not what Mr. Clive Bell 
would call the “significant,” element in their 
designs that appealed to such artists as Whistler 
and Rossetti. It was left for the present century 
to discover that the decoration was not so much 
an aim in itself as an accident resulting from a 
deep sense of the underlying harmony and unity 
of nature, combined with a reverent sympathy for 
materials. 

Unlike Western art, which has alternated or 
hesitated between expression and realistic imita- 
tion as a means to evoke reality, the art of the 
Chinese has never swerved from expression. 
Consequently, and this is often overlooked, it 
has been able to carry realistic representation to 
extreme lengths without obscuring the issue; as 
a man who is at home in the spiritual world can 
indulge in material pursuits and enjoyments that 
would be fatal to a person who had no guidance 
but rules of conduct based on self-respect and 
the opinions of others. For the same reason the 
medizeval illuminators could afford to make jokes 
on the margins of their missals. No European 
painter dare allow himself the amount of detail 
that a Chinese animal painter often put into his 
work, for fear of being called photographic. 
The truth is that the amount of detail has no 


F.C. Friescke ; 


“our les, Dunes’? 2 es ae 
A, STUDY of light, the colour being hardly more than? at 
the shadow of light, yet the tones are so nicely related — a ae, 
that there is no effect of unreality, The eure looks CO Fe 
capable of movement. Res! Ne 


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, Ye Nama g at HERE we see the influence of Mr. ‘Brangwyn ‘proudly 
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Plate X. 


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Laura Knight oe 


CORA. a A Ait i | oe ahs 

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Plate XI. 


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puens Mot Bras the collection of Gk Saag Haren Bi 


HE work of a ‘painter he ration more on the genatbility Ta ana 

See apn of. his vision than on the intrinsic appeal of subject. hs 
Everything is weighed and balanced, -and set down in its | ° 

exact value and with great tact of arrangement, This ‘is 
a form of art peculiarly French, as evident in the > literature 
as in the ae of that panot. 


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Y one of the greatest vide painters of aah who | 
shares with Zuloaga the leadership of the modern — 
Spanish school, As the great Basque expresses the dignity, 
Sorolla gives us the movement and colour of. his mative, 
land. 


‘ ; 

APRARY: 

-UNIvERSIoy aE: 
UIVERSITY. OF Rujnoug 
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' Plate XIII. 


THE work ofa painter who combines, ia the pre-Raphaclite 
| “manner, the attractions of keen drawing and bright — 
vies f _ colour, AY Get, tick Realism ’ ” with a difference ; e ‘because the 


interest of character is” not sacrificed othe, a pmediate 
impression. of the eyes, x 


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Plate XIV. 


) pattern ; trusting 
a 5 ; a great. deal of the enigeional ‘effect intended to the - 
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Plate XV. 


‘ the 
DRAMATIC ftuetracion be a eat os Anon in ‘yi : 
Bi! her decorative studies of tree branches her alata as sa 


es _ a designer, — Great appreciation. of character heh 
the expressions of the different heads, 


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eS 


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Hil 


MODERN ART 25 


bearing on the question ; it is the way the detail 
is seen and .reproduced. However close to 
nature the Chinese painting, the detail is always 
subject to design, and there is always a complete 
translation into the idiomatic language of the 
material used. Subordination of detail to the 
general effect is quite a different thing, because 
the general effect may be merely an imitation of 
appearance—as in Impressionism, for example. 

To compare a study by one of our best bird 
painters with a similar work by a Japanese or 
Chinese artist is a most illuminating experience. 
With less detail in the feathers, and a softer 
treatment, the Western work looks photographic, 
while the Eastern does not. In the Western 
work the detail has been exploited in the interests 
of accuracy, while in the Eastern it has been 
sympathetically enjoyed for its own sake. Every 
feather has been helped to expression in the new 
material. It is on account of their disregard of 
optical accuracy, by the way, that the diagrams 
in an ornithological or a botanical work are often 
not only clearer, but better artistically than the 
naturalistic illustrations. Not having to con- 
vince the eye, the artist has been able to devote 
himself to addressing the mind with all the 
powers and beauties of his medium. 

For a similar reason there is no distinction in 
Chinese art between decorative and pictorial. 
Whether the artist carved a piece of jade or 
ivory, or painted a landscape in ink on silk, he 
was always about the business of expression. It 
is doubtful if you can express reality without 
becoming decorative. As Carlyle pointed out, 
all very sincere speech tends to be rhythmical, 
and the same idea is enshrined in “the music 
of the spheres.” Too often the only thing the 
Western artist thinks about expressing is him- 
self; though if there is one thing certain in art 
it is that a man must lose himself to find himself. 
Personality in art is what is left over when you 
have forgotten all about it in doing the work. 

It is an interesting question, though rather 

beyond the scope of this book and the knowledge 


of the writer, how much Eastern art owes to its 
harmony with Eastern religion and philosophy. 
Not so much in the sense of being employed by 
them as in that of expressing the same beliefs 
and ideals. This unity, and its apparently bene- 
ficial effects upon art, has led some weak-headed 
Westerners astray—into “Esoteric Buddhism ” 
and the like. It is not that Buddhism is 
“better” than Christianity in itself, or so: good 
for the Western mind, but that the Eastern artist 
is able to make a more complete and single- 
hearted use of his religion in his work. Not only 
the spirit but the methods of his painting are 
backed by all he knows and believes about the 
visible and invisible worlds. One might almost 
call the advantage technical; the possession of 
an instrument that will serve all purposes. The 
Western artist, even when employed by the 
Church, is always having to make a compromise 
between faith and reason; between Sunday and 
weekday religion, so to speak. I do not mean 
in the sense of having to live by his painting, 
nor in having to paint secular subjects, but in 
having to paint—even when he designs a 
“sacred” or an “ideal” subject—as if he be- 
lieved that appearance was the reality. In a 
sense an early Italian and a Victorian British 
angel are equally impossible; but the former 
does not look impossible, because it is frankly the 
expression of an idea, and not the copy of a 
healthy young woman with unexplained wings. 
The difference between the wings of an angel by 
Fra Angelico and by G. F. Watts is something 
other than the difference between decorative and 
pictorial treatment. It is the difference between 
reality and realism. The mind accepts the one 
angel without jibbing at the anatomy, but con- 
dones the other as a polite fiction—to be quizzed 
with the curate in profane moments. Mr. Gran- 
ville Barker made the same happy distinction 
with his gold fairies in “Midsummer Night’s 
Dream.” They were absolutely real, and yet 
fixed for ever in a different world from that 
of the human actors; whereas the fairies of other 


26 MODERN ART 


productions belong only to the make-believe 
world of pantomime. The Reformation drove 
all real angels and fairies into hiding, and only 
a few modern artists besides Blake have ever 
caught a glimpse of them. Certainly the 
creatures, dreadful in the wrong sense, that 
appear in contemporary war-pictures were made 
in Germany. It is the inadequacy of realistic 
art to give matter-of-fact expression to spiritual 
truths, by the way, that drives the Western artist 
into the dismal ways of allegory. 

The distinction between Sunday and weekday 
religion is, or rather was, one of the paradoxes of 
Western life. And it must be admitted that the 
apparent success of the compromise between 
them in art is often astonishing. It is quite 
common, for example, to find a man engaged in 
or having money invested in some soul and 
beauty destroying business and at the same time 
writing poems or painting pictures of regret at 
the destruction of beauty by commercial enter- 
prise with no apparent effect of insincerity. 
Still, the division of energy must rob the work of 
something, since the full weight of the man can- 
not be on both sides at once. “ Cruel necessity” 
cannot be more than a merely sentimental 
inspiration, whereas the acceptance of spiritual 
reality by the Chinese artist appears to be per- 
fectly matter-of-fact. He uses the same artistic 
convention for a goddess, a fairy, a mythical 
monster, a sage, a camellia, a horse, or a tiger. 

Support is lent to this view by the fact that 
the sympathy between Eastern and Western art 


is always closest in proportion, as the latter does 


express the artist's whole reaction to the 
universe, visible and invisible. A Chinese 
painting which would look hopelessly out of 
place in a collection of Dutch seventeenth or 
French or English eighteenth century pictures 
would look perfectly at home among the Italian 


or Flemish “ Primitives” in the National: 


Gallery. The likeness of the “Earthly Para- 
dise” by an unknown Ming painter, in the British 
Museum, to the work of Botticelli, has often been 


remarked. Nor is the sympathy confined to 
those periods in which the accident of being 
employed by the Church led the artist to paint 
subjects that are technically “sacred.” I have 
seen a landscape by Cotman that could have 
been hung beside a Sung painting of a waterfall 


without any effect of incongruity. Or, to take an 


illustration from our own time, a Chinese paint- 
ing would not look nearly so strange in the New 
English Art Club as it would in the Academy. 

- What it comes to is that when painting is done 
in the same spirit, regarding the appearances of 
nature as not more than convenient symbols of 
reality at the free disposal of design, and the 
materials of painting as having intrinsic proper- 
ties capable of expression, the differences 
between Eastern and Western art are reduced to 
the differences between dialects of the same 
language, 

All this, which may seem like a digression, has 
a direct bearing on contemporary art. The dis- 
covery of the twentieth century that things are 
not what they seem amounts to a reconciliation 
between faith and reason closer than any since 
the age of primitive belief which lasted until the 
end of the Gothic period. It was not necessarily 
that people were more religious, then, but that 
they made no distinction between knowing and 
believing. Like the body of Chinese art, the 
Gothic cathedral was a consistent reading of the 
whole universe in terms of different materials. 
Natural and supernatural history were treated 
with the same matter-of-factness. In the inter- 
val the human intellect made a wide excursion 
through the material world. Like a child with 
new toys, it delighted in facts, and this delight 
was reflected in art in pride of mastery over 
appearances. During the closing years of the 
nineteenth century, however, the human intellect 
arrived by several ways at the conclusion, always 
held by faith, that facts are only convenient 
fancies. Only then was the Western mind 
capable of appreciating the true meaning of 
Eastern art, and with less conscious borrowing 


MODERN ART 27 


there was a much deeper sympathy and influence. 
Something must be allowed for greater freedom 
of intercourse between East and West, but much 
more for the frame of mind. 

Western art, in short, has won its way by 
inductive reasoning back to the position always 
held by the East; and there can be no doubt 
that it has gained enormously in the process, and 
that it should keep its gains. A deliberate imi- 
tation of Chinese painting would be as foolish as 
a deliberate attempt to mix the elements of 
Buddhism and Christianity. It is even ques- 
tionable if the new spirit in the West can be 
called “ religious” in itself; the most that can be 
said for it is that it gives a chance to any religion 
the individual may have by discrediting material 
cocksureness and encouraging the expression of 
that sub-conscious mind which receives “ intima- 
tions of immortality.” And, in the last analysis, 
nothing has done more to bring this about, to 
reconcile Eastern and Western art and abolish 
the distinction between knowing and believing, 
than renewed interest in paint. The touch of 
nature that makes the whole’ world kin might 
very well be interpreted as the touch of a 
common substance. There is virtue in the stuff. 
It is only when you take a substance on its 
merits, and use it according to its laws without 
reference to keeping up appearances, that it 
becomes, in the true sense, a means of expres- 
sion. 


Chapter VI, 


C RUTH to nature” was the pre- 
sumptuous artistic watchword of the 
closing years of the nineteenth 
century; “Truth to paint” is the 

humbler and more practical artistic watchword 

of the twentieth century; and the principle of 

Vincent van Gogh, “Be true to your palette, 


and nature results,” is tacitly accepted by all the 
more characteristic painters of the present day. 

That the principle was ever lost sight of was 
probably due mainly to the separation of the 
“professional artist” from the journeyman 
painter, the former being over-developed on 
the literary and theoretical side in Academies, 
while the latter declined to the mere labourer. 
William Morris and his colleagues tried hard to 
restore a more healthy relationship between the 
studio and the workshop, and the Arts and 
Crafts Society and the County Council Schools 
of Art have undoubtedly had some effect; but 
until we get a real revival of house-painting, in 
the sense of mural decoration, it is unlikely that 
the good old system of apprenticeship and 
different degrees of craftsmanship under a 
master-painter will return. 

The obstacle is really economical. So long 
as contracts for decoration are given to firms of 
middlemen, there is bound to be a division of 
labour beyond that indicated by different kinds 
and degrees of skill. The whole system of 
picture-dealing, with its trafic in names, is also 
against the collaborative industry, which, as 
Morris & Co. were well aware, is the only basis 
for sound training and conditions in any craft. 
All this, of course, is only part of the’ general 
division between work and “ business,” which is 
such a characteristic evil of modern life. You 
have an unorganised body of men producing 
things, and a powerful ring dealing in the things 
that they produce. Prices, which are the coun- 
ters of “business,” bear no relation to values, 
and are decided mainly by fashion and advertise- 
ment. For the purposes of picture-dealing it is 
hardly necessary to see, or even.to possess, the 
pictures; and they might conveniently be repre- 
sented by “ scrip.” 

With all these hindrances, however, modern 
painters are getting back to their paint-pots. 
Leaving out the deliberately “advanced ” efforts, 
you cannot go into a more modern exhibition, 


_ say that of the New English Art Club, without 


28 MODERN 


being struck by the signs of greater interest in 
paint as paint. As compared with the Academy, 
the difference is, broadly, that between an 
exhibition of pictures and an exhibition of 
paintings. In the more modern exhibition the 
imitative, illustrative and story-telling characters 
are less pronounced; while, on the other hand, 
the designs are more definite, the forms clearer 
and simpler, and the colours brighter and flatter 
in treatment; and the paint itself seems to be 
used with more concern for its intrinsic proper- 
ties and less for its facility in realistic representa- 
tion. What it amounts to is that, after a long 
preoccupation with truth to nature, in the 
optical sense, painting is coming back to the 
view that the real potency of a picture is in form 
and colour expressed in characteristic terms of 
the material the artist happens to be using. 
Here as elsewhere, however, you will find 
different degrees of realism in representation. 
The degree depends upon the whole mental 
make-up of the individual artist; and, as a rule, 
the results are happiest when he obeys the con- 
sensus of all his faculties without any ulterior 
motive. A decorative or an abstract design by 
Mr. John Sargent is not an exhilarating per- 
formance; while, on the other hand, when Mr. 
Augustus John sets out to give us a realistic 
portrait we rather wish that he wouldn’t. It is 
mainly a matter of vision. A strong imagina- 
tion, that is to say, a strong vision of reality, has 
no need of realism to convey the impression of 
truth; it can reduce the forms of nature to con- 


ventional symbols, trees to triangles on sticks, ~ 


and the sea to wavy lines, and still the truth will 
be conveyed; while a man of weak imagination 
instinctively relies on the close reproduction of 
actual appearances, and develops great skill in 
reproducing them. On the whole, Mr. Belloc’s 
advice to the child is good for the artist: “If you 
were born to walk the ground, Remain there; do 
not fool around.” Both Martha and Mary loved 
our Lord, but they had different ways of express- 
ing their love, Superior as is imaginative to 


ART 


imitative painting, there is nothing more depress- 
ing than when a painter of strong realistic bent 
attempts an imaginative design. 

But with all these individual differences there 
is a characteristic general difference in the 
realism attempted by modern painters. Speak- 
ing generally, it is no longer an optical realism. 
The portraits at the New English Art Club do 
not, as a rule, jump out of their frames at you, 
nor do the landscapes deceive you into thinking 
you could walk through the wall. 

The difference is not easy to make clear in 
words, but it can be made clearer by illustration. 
Why, for example, cannot the late Mr. Frith, 
who was painting more or less at the same time, 
be grouped with the pre-Raphaelites? Their 
pictures—Madox Brown’s “ Work,” for example 
—are even fuller than his of “ corroborative detail 
to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise 
bald and unconvincing” representation. The 
difference is, broadly, that in Mr. Frith’s pictures 
the artistic verisimilitude is aimed at the eye, 
while in Madox Brown’s it is aimed at the mind. 
In the one case the eye is made the critic, while 
in the other it is used only asa channel. I[ can- 
not remember any picture by the greater pre- 


-Raphaelites, not even the “Blind Girl” of 


Millais, that seems to aim at optical illusion. 
Rightly or wrongly, the detail is treated as a sort 
of moral or decorative asset, to be dwelt on 
lovingly for its own sake and for its value to the 
mind, and not at all in order to make the subject 
more convincing to the eye. As a matter of 
cold fact, it often made the subject less con- 
vincing to the eye; but it was cheerfully put 
there either because it was there or because it 
had some symbolical or decorative meaning. 
With less moral earnestness, but more tact, 
you will find the same sort of realism in modern 
exhibitions. Painters like Mr. William Strang, 
Mr. Eric H. Kennington, and Mr. William 
Rothenstein keep very close to nature, and intro- 
duce a considerable amount of detail into their 
pictures, but they never seem to be trying to 


MODERN ART 29 


deceive the eye. One might compare the differ- 
ence between mental and optical realism to that 
between trying to reproduce the noises of a 
street by finding the right words for them and by 
making inarticulate noises to imitate them. The 
latter method might be more successful in 
creating an immediate illusion, but only at the 
sacrifice of the characteristic interest and beauty 
of language. So, as the works of the pre- 

Raphaelites illustrate, mental realism in painting 
is compatible with expression of the intrinsic 
beauty of paint, while optical realism is not. 
Moreover, with mental realism the effect of 
reality, though not so immediately astonishing, 
lasts longer. For whatever reason, modern 
painters seem to have arrived at the conclusion 
that the abiding conviction is more important 
than the immediate illusion of reality, and that 
the intrinsic properties of paint are worth culti- 
vating. 

Illusion as a means to reality, however, still 
haunts the minds of some good painters—chiefly 
those who have been influenced by the French 
Impressionists. Mr. Wilson Steer is a charac- 
teristic example. It would be as absurd to deny 
the interest and beauty of his paint as to deny 
the truth of his representations. But, to a 
certain extent, the one does get in the way of the 
other. This is what simple people really mean 
when they say that pictures like Mr. Steer’s look 
“unfinished.” They do not succeed in getting 
the focus in which the rough paint becomes the 
object represented. The painter has every right 
to claim his focus; all I would point out is that 
if he gave up the attempt at optical illusion he 
would not need it. Mr. Wolmark, for example, 
paints rougher and thicker than Mr. Steer, but 
because he makes no attempt at illusion the 
simplest person, though he may, and often does, 
dislike Mr. Wolmark’s pictures on other grounds, 
is never bothered by his paint. Feeling instinc- 
tively that he is looking not at an attempted 
illusion but at an exercise in paint, he accepts 
its roughness and thickness as part of the game. 


If you see a person screwing up his eyes in 
front of one of Mr. Wolmark’s pictures, it is not 
because he is really trying to get the focus, but 
because he thinks, mistakenly, that it is the 
proper thing to do. But I have seen old ladies, 
incapable of affectation, screwing up their eyes 
in front of one of Mr. Steer’s. 

This is not to say that Mr. Wolmark is a 
better painter than Mr. Steer—far from it—but 
only that he treats the business of painting more 
frankly as painting. It would be a great day 
for painting if everybody understood and agreed 
that, though subtler, it is just as much a handi- 
craft in a particular material as working in 
coloured silks or wools. Nobody is bothered by 
the obvious stitches in a piece of embroidery. 
Perfectly aware of this truth, good painters like 
Mr. Steer are nevertheless trying to serve the 
God of things as they are—in the substance of 
paint—and at the same time to pacify the God 
of things as they look like; and, not unnaturally, 
the paint protests. 

In art we should learn to distinguish clearly 
between magic and conjuring-tricks. The 
essence of magic is that the spell, formula, 
incantation, or whatever you like to call-it, need 
bear no apparent relationship to the effect pro- 
duced. You do or say something—wave a 
wand, scatter hemp-seed, or say “Open 
Sesame” or “ Abracadabra”—and something 
happens. Conjuring-tricks have to be con- 
vincing all the time. You may say that magic 
is not possible in art. My retort is that it is 
done every day in outline drawing. The lines of 
pencil or ink are not in the least like anything in 
nature, but because the spell is familiar nature 
happens in the mind of the observer. It is only 
in a substance that really can be made to look 
like nature, such as oil paint, that the artist is 
tempted to help out magic with conjuring-tricks. 

The remedy is greater confidence in the magic 
of paint. It is because they resist the tempta- 
tion, because with insufficient faith in magic they 
will not descend to conjuring-tricks, that painters 


30 MODERN ART 


like Mr. Steer puzzle the public. Painters who 
embrace conjuring-tricks whole-heartedly, sacri- 
fice paint entirely to illusion, are sure of their 
reward. For the public, accepting the illusion, 
is quite capable of seeing when the trick is 
cleverly performed, and will even take a delight 
in pointing out how it has been taken-in by the 
painter. Mr. Sargent is too sincere an artist to 
attempt illusion for any reason except that he 
believes it to be the best way of conveying 
reality; but there can be no doubt that he owes 
much of his reputation with the general public 
to sleight of hand. You will often see people 
examining one of his pictures at different 
distances, and hear them exclaiming how won- 
derful it is that meaningless dabs of paint resolve 
themselves into a portrait that “stands out from 
the canvas.” From their conversation it is quite 
evident that they suppose, approvingly, the 
painter to have done it that way in order to show 
off his skill. And not long ago a well-known art 
critic praised a portrait by Mr. Sargent for the 
- accident it might share with washing on a 
clothes-line or the stump of a tree of being mis- 
taken for a real person. 

Such a misunderstanding of the real nature of 
art could not happen with the work of an artist 
who believes whole-heartedly in the magic of 
paint; who puts the onus of truth not upon 
illusion but upon the direct appeal of form and 
colour and substance. His design encloses 
recognisable shapes of nature, but it has a life 
and meaning of its own that would still be potent 
if they were unrecognisable, and does persist in 
the mind when they are forgotten; as the rhythm 
of a verse carries beyond the words, and haunts 
the memory when they have passed from it. 
His forms may be close to the forms of nature, 
as in a portrait by Titian or a landscape by 
Claude, or far from them, as in an Egyptian 


papyrus or a Byzantine mosaic; but they exist 


by their own vitality and not only by suffrage of 
what they resemble. His red and blue and 
green do their work as red and blue and green, 


owing hardly more to their plausibility to appear- 
ance than do the words “red” and “blue” and 
“green” to the blood or the sky or the grass 
with which they happen to be associated. It is 
only when reality is established by such means 
that paint can be given full freedom. Released 


from fawning upon appearances, in a design con- | 


ceived in its own substance, it can be spread 
thick or thin, rough or smooth, with or without 
modulation, without any risk to truth or beauty. 
In a homely phrase, it has no appearances to 
keep up. I had to visit the Prado Museum, the 
shrine of Velazquez, to understand that Titian 
was the greater painter. With all his gifts the 
Spaniard had not freed his imagination from the 
tyranny of the eye as an optical instrument; and 
therefore, nobly as he used his paint, he still used 
it to keep up appearances, He could not trust 
paint to deliver its own message. 


Chapter VII. 


NE significant result of renewed 
confidence in paint is the gradual 
disappearance of the quite arbitrary 
distinction between pictorial and 

decorative painting. In any modern exhibition 
there will be a number of works that it would be 
difficult to assign exclusively to either class, and 
this is natural. Once paint is trusted, it becomes 
evident that decoration is compatible with truth 
and reality with formal design. 
capacity for illustration or story-telling dimi- 
nished by decorative treatment, but rather the 
reverse. The Bayeux Tapestry, one of the 
most complete and detailed pieces of illustration 
in the world, is highly decorative; and stained- 
glass windows are proverbially “storied.” Both 


tapestry and windows, it may be observed, are — 


done in materials of pronounced character, so 
that the artists were not tempted to crab their 


Nor is the 


MODERN ART 31 


decoration or confuse their story-telling with 
undue realism in the optical sense. 
The distinction between decorative and pic- 


‘torial art was never more valid than that between 


formal and programme music. In a sense all 
music is formal, and all is descriptive or 
dramatic; and just as any distinction would be 
ridiculous between the men who play or com- 
pose one or the other, so it seems likely that the 
abolition of the arbitrary distinction between 
pictorial and decorative painting will help to 
bring back the old healthy relationship between 
the studio and the workshop. As a matter of 
fact it has begun to do so, and a great many 
pictorial artists practise not only decorative 
painting, but some other handicraft as well. 
Except among the Morris group such a thing 
was extremely rare in the nineteenth century. 
With the rehabilitation of the paint-pot “ brother 
brush” has taken on a new and wider meaning. 

But the good influence of the paint-pot does 
not end there. It is often said that the “ subject 
picture” is no longer painted; but that is only 
a half-truth. It is painted differently. Trust- 
ing more to paint and design, the modern painter 
does not need to make such elaborate composi- 
tions, or to juggle so elaborately with light and 
circumstances for story-telling, illustrative, anec- 
dotal, or dramatic purposes. Unlike the realistic 
painter, he does not have to pretend that the 
elements conspired to bring the principal figures 
into relief. 

This is particularly true of the kind of subject 
that is called “imaginative.” The typical 
imaginative picture of the nineteenth century 
was allegorical in form. It was a genuine 
attempt to interpret life in larger and more 
universal terms than is possible by the repre- 
sentation of particular scenes or incidents, but 
the meaning was illustrated by what the figures 
were wearing, carrying, or doing, rather than by 
painting them in a more expressive way. You 
were expected to read the meaning as you read 
the meaning of a charade; and success was 


mainly a matter of costume and symbolical 
“properties.” Allegories are still painted, but 
as a rule the modern painter tries to go deeper. 
Feeling that everything in ordinary life has a 
universal significance if only it can be found, 
and being no longer haunted by the bugbear of 
truth to nature in the optical sense, he adds 
nothing to life in the way of “ properties,” but 
rather tries by simplification, and even distortion, 
to rid form and gesture of the accidental and 
transitory, and lay stress upon the essential and 
permanent. It may be only a family at supper, 
or a group of women washing clothes, but the 
attempt, at any rate, is to bring out what may be 
called the sacramental meaning of the scene. 
Released from bondage to appearance, paint 
loyally responds by revealing more of its beauty 
and character in proportion as it is treated in a 
large and simple way; and so improvement in 
design and in craftsmanship go hand in hand. 
In this better meaning of the words, and with 
the widest individual differences in conception 
and treatment, George Clausen, Augustus John, 
William Orpen, Charles Sims, William Strang, 
the late John Currie, Cayley Robinson, William 
Shackleton, Randolph Schwabe, Jack B. Yeats, 
Jacob Kramer, Charles Shannon, Spencer 
Watson, Mark Gertler, J. D. Fergusson, Max- 
well Armfield, Walter Bayes, C. R. W. Nevin- 
son, James Pryde, William Rothenstein, and 
Joseph Edward Southall—to take a list of names 
almost at random—may all be called painters of 
imaginative subject pictures. 

The new spirit in landscape is remarkable. 
Briefly, the picturesque is dead, or at any rate 
hopelessly discredited, as an artistic motive. 
Unknown in classical times, it was essentially a 
passing phase; the invention of an age of un- 
belief, a confession of imaginative bankruptcy, a 
fillip to the jaded eye as truly as the savour of 
decomposition is a fillip to the jaded palate. At 
risk of being tiresome, I cannot help dwelling on 
the moral significance of the picturesque. 
Nothing could have been less democratic, more 


Schwabe | 
“The Gravediggers fi 


$7 


HERE is something of grandeur in this picture, It is 
achieved by significant gesture and the massive 


_ treatment of the drawing. ; i 


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Plate XVII. 


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Plate XXIV. 


MODERN ART 33 


hostile to the spirit of brotherhood. Since the 
picturesque results from ruin and decay, it meant 
that you were dependent for your esthetic 
pleasure upon the moral and material disabilities 
of your fellow creatures. If you were a humane 
person, as many of the picturesque painters un- 
doubtedly were, there was necessarily a breach 
between your social and your zsthetic opinions. 
You prized as a painter what you deplored as a 
man, and nothing contributed more surely and 
directly to the separation of art from life, to the 
prejudice of both. By far the least injurious 
cultivation of the picturesque was the extreme 
form of it which concerned itself with classical 
ruins. Since life no longer depended upon 
them, they could be exploited for the purpose 
of painting without the inhumanity implied in 
painting insanitary cottages or neglected fields. 
There could hardly be a stronger proof of the 
materialism of the last half of the nineteenth 
century than its identification of art and poetry 
with the picturesque. It is significant that the 
view was supported by the philosophers and 
men of science. In one of the essays of Herbert 
Spencer, or it may be in his Autobiography, 
there is a passage in which, while praising 
improved methods of farming, he regrets, on 
sentimental and artistic grounds, the disappear- 
ance of untidy hedgerows and _ rambling 
footpaths. From the context it is quite clear 
that he regarded efficiency and beauty as incom- 
patible. Nobody would deny that many modern 
ways of doing things are ugly, and the cause of 
ugliness; but no modern philosopher worthy of 
the name would admit that the reason is that 
they are efficient. On the contrary, he would 
lay stress on the truth that ugliness is always a 
sign of comparative inefficiency. The modern 
artist would go further, and claim that anything 
really efficient is beautiful essentially, and not 
merely in certain lights and conditions—“ in the 
dusk with the light behind it.” He would sub- 
scribe to George Meredith’s condition as the 


most practical test of anything in human life: 
“Ts it accepted of song?” 

It would be interesting to know, by the way, 
when and why the picturesque heresy began. 
To judge from the backgrounds of Italian 
pictures and the miniature illustrations to illu- 
minated Books of Hours, the earlier painters 
delighted in emphasising the spick-and- Be 
tidiness of cultivated nature. 

Closely connected with the picturesque Kee 
was the fear of machinery and the machine-made 
that did so much to hinder the good work and 
teaching of Ruskin and his followers. It is true 
that the immediate effect of machinery is to 
separate man from the materials he uses, but in 
the end it will bring him back again by new 
paths with a larger and more sensitive control. 
Besides, the process of separation did not begin 
with what we now understand as “ machinery.” 
The first man who used a fork instead of his 
fingers undoubtedly lost something of intimate 
acquaintance with his food, and the first woman 
who spun flax with a wheel instead of worrying 
it with teeth and tongue lost touch with the 
material to that Having begun 
machinery in the shape of the spinning-wheel, 
we must go through with it, making up for loss 
of manual touch with materials with a keener 
perception of their properties and possibilities 
by means of other faculties. Craftsmanship con- 
tinually ascends from the fingers to the brain, 
and with a more perfect sense of what is needed 
to be done machinery simplifies—as it has 
already simplified in living memory. 

The other objection to machinery—monotony 
in production—has neither intellectual nor 
esthetic respectability. Given a clear vision of 
the conditions, there is as much beauty in 
uniformity as in variety; and it is doubtful if 
a person who fails to appreciate the one has 
really felt the other. Anything that is needed 
for the same purpose by millions of people is 
not only practically, but zsthetically, the better 
for uniformity. Small variations in the capitals 


extent. 


34 MODERN 


of a Gothic building are a delight, but they 
would be a defect in the girders of a railway 
station; and to give up railway stations is a 
counsel not of perfection but of despair. 

All this fuss about machinery and the 
machine-made, for and against, is really a shirk- 
ing of design. No machine ever invented will 
ever be able to design; so that the first business 
of the artist remains exactly the same, the only 
difference being in the tools and instruments at 
his command. Michélangelo would have taken 
a pride in designing for steam-hammers. The 
commonest example of shirking design is in the 
arts of reproduction, such as engraving. The 
more a man relies on minor variations of print- 
ing for personal expression, the less likely he is 
to perfect his design—which is his real channel 
of expression. So long as books were written 
“by hand” the personal variation counted; but 
with the invention of printing, uniformity, in the 
same fount of type, became an artistic virtue. 
There is plenty of scope for variety in the founts 
of type that may be designed, and in the arrange- 
ment of the page, but printing qua printing 1s, 
and should be, a matter of mechanical accuracy. 
Penny stamps are better zesthetically for being 
all alike; the opportunity for variation comes in 
the differences between them and twopenny and 
threepenny stamps. 

But there is no need to multiply examples. 
The root of the whole trouble is mixing up 
machinery with life, confusing truth with 
accuracy. Art has nothing to do with accidents, 


and machinery is as irrelevant to life as clocks 


are to the sun; but you do not flatter the sun 
by putting your clocks wrong, and the man who 
misses trains is as tiresome practically, intel- 
lectually, and esthetically as the man who times 
his walking for pleasure with a stop-watch. 

Of course the fear of machinery was only the 
other side of making too much of it; and it is 
amusing to note that its rejection by artists was 
followed by exploitation on equally mistaken 
grounds. For a time, at any rate, there was a 


Ot Od Fig’ ee 


ART 


fashion in painting factories and foundries, and 
it was quite the correct thing to talk about the 
romance of industry and the new artistic motives 
that machinery had brought into life. But, upon 
analysis, the romance of industry was merely the 
noise and smell of it, and it was not machinery, 
but its defects and failures, that supplied the new 
motives. ‘The real meaning of machinery, as an 
aid to accuracy and precision in departments of 
life where they are practical and artistic virtues, 
was just as much ignored as when it was damned 
by Ruskin and Morris; and the new pictures 
were nothing more than studies of wasted energy 
as expressed in smoke, steam, and rubbish- 
heaps. The last thing that a painter thought of 
doing was to paint machinery in a way that 
expressed its construction and function. He 
must fling it into violent perspective, surround 
it with the figures of men whose actions and 
gestures advertised its inefficiency, and fasten 
upon it some fanciful resemblance to an animal. 
“Very like a whale” might serve as a title for 
many pictures of this period. The new fashion, 
in fact, was nothing more than the picturesque 
transferred from bad farming to bad indus- 
trialism. 

No doubt a weakness for the picturesque still 
survives in art, but, on the whole, our painters 
do try to accept the conditions of modern life for 
just what they are worth and what they express. 
They neither avoid machinery nor go out of 
their way to glorify it for what it is not—a sub- 
stitute for life—but take or leave it and its effects 
as they happen or do not in the landscape. 
When a member of the Cumberland Market 
Group paints a Tube station he tries to make 
it as much like a Tube station as possible, 
neither shirking its lines nor toning down its 
colours; but he keeps it in quite friendly rela- 
tions with the blue sky above and the green trees 
beside it. He paints it, in fact, in the same spirit 
in which he uses it, which is about as near to 
reality in art as any man can go. The essence 
of the picturesque heresy was to pretend that you 


- 


MODERN ART 35 


valued a thing more or less on artistic grounds 
than you did on practical grounds; so that, one 
way or the other, you had to paint with your 
tongue in your cheek. 

The whole activities of the Cumberland 
Market Group, now merged in the London 
Group, are typical of the new spirit in landscape 
painting. Within the group there are interest- 
ing differences, and the name “ Neo-Realist” 
adopted by some of the members seems to be an 
apology rather than a description, since each of 
them works in a definite convention, if only of 
colour; but the characteristics of unprejudiced 
regard for nature and loyalty to paint are 
common to the group. In general they paint 
what is nearest to hand—London streets and 
squares and suburban back-gardens—but not in 
any spirit of narrow provincialism. Indeed, the 
belief expressed is that for the purpose of land- 
scape painting there is no real distinction 
between London, the suburbs, the country, and 
abroad; that nothing, not even the romantic 
“view,” is artistically common or unclean. If 
they paint a mountain they neither belittle nor 
fawn upon it, and if they paint a factory they 
show the same interested appreciation of its real 
character and purpose that an early Italian 
showed with a wine-press or a threshing-floor. 
Consequently, in spite of all the differences of 
period, subject-matter, and climate, their works 
are far more like those of an Italian city 
“school,” of Padua or Siena, than was anything 
that came between. The reason is not that they 
are painted in the same manner, but in the same 
spirit of matter-of-fact sincerity; and, as a 
general rule, when a critic says that Mr. So-and- 
so has adopted a “ primitive” manner, he only 
means that Mr. So-and-so is painting with a 
proper disregard of anything but his job and his 
materials, There is no indication that any 
artist up to the end of the fifteenth century cared 
a toss about truth to nature. All he cared about 
was truth to his conception of reality; and in 
that conception the evidence of his eyes counted 


far less than his religious beliefs, his notions of 
natural history, and his practical familiarity with 
the activities represented. From the early 
seventeenth to the late nineteenth century land- 
scape painting was a sort of propaganda to 
advertise all sorts of pathetic fallacies about 
nature, and we are only now beginning to look 
at landscape with the eyes of faith again. 

The difference between the old and the new- 
old spirit in landscape might be expressed as that 
between extensive and intensive culture. The 
picturesque painter needed a lot of land for the 
business, and to go a long way to find it, and his 
crop of impressions was bulky in amount rather 
than rich in quality. And if you come to think 
about it, there was a connection between the 
picturesque heresy in art and the ownership and 
use of land at any time since the dissolution of 
the monasteries, which was the end of really 
practical agriculture, at any rate in England. 
For landowners, poets, and painters alike rural 
life became a sort of raw material to be exploited 
for the pleasure of the few, or to point a moral or 
adorn a tale. Even the pictures of that very 
great painter, George Morland, illustrate a sort 
of zsthetic slumming. 

The modern landscape painter is content with 
a small-holding, and he would as lief that it 
should be a market-garden as a rolling park or a 
desolate moor. He knows. that if he cannot find 
nature in Putney he will not find her in Cumber- 
land or Cornwall; that the gestures of trees and 
the shapes of sky between are as significant on 
Primrose Hill as in Wye Valley. And if you 
get to the bottom of it you will see that the 
change in attitude, in both land policy and land- 
scape painting, was not so much due to a change 
of theories in the abstract as the automatic result 
of a renewed or revived appreciation of the stuff; 
human nature in the one case, and paint in the 
other. It is recognised that land must be 
ordered in terms of human nature, and that land- 
scape must be painted in terms of paint. The 
result in both cases is a more intensive culture. 


36 MODERN ART 


Once you begin to go over the face of landscape 
in terms of paint instead of with some poetical 
gospel or in some doctrine of truth to nature, you 
find that very little subject-matter suits your 
purpose, that one sort is almost as good as 
another, and that it need not be sophisticated in 
the interests of art. The reality of bricks and 
mortar, park railings, pruned bushes, and garden 
rollers, when you find it through paint, is new 
and strange enough for any person of real 
imagination. Nowhere is this truth better illus- 
trated, by the way, than in the landscapes of the 
brothers John and Paul Nash. They choose 
habitually the most ordinary scenes—market- 
gardens or orchards as often as not—but by 
insisting on real as distinct from optical character 
they get more of the romance and poetry of 
nature into a few rows of raspberry-canes and a 
yard or two of wire-netting than the late Mr. 
MacWhirter would have got into a Highland 
deer-forest. 

Not that the modern landscape painter has any 
need to avoid scenes that are naturally romantic. 
On the contrary, one effect of being firmly 
grounded in paint and immune from the pictur- 
esque is to free him from the priggish dread of 
made “views” that was characteristic of land- 
scape painting since the days of Turner. Unlike 
the Impressionist, he has no reason to be touchy 
about subject interest. Better than any of his 
forerunners, at any rate since the Middle Ages, 
he can afford to paint a spade a spade without 
fear of being called literal. As a matter of fact, 


you cannot be literal if you deal with anything 


in terms of the medium. The result is that 
modern landscape is both extremely emancipated 
and remarkably full of the subject interest that 
appeals to the ordinary person. Just as the 
modern subject painter can tell a story with all 
the more point and detail for not worrying about 
truth to nature in the optical sense, so the modern 
landscape painter can afford to be minutely 
topographical—and topography is a very real 
interest. 


One has only to run over a list of modern 
landscape painters to recognise how wide is the 
range of subject interest. Arnesby Brown, 
George Clausen, C. J. Holmes, D. Y. Cameron, 
Wilson Steer, Maresco Pearce, Charles M. 
Gere, Sydney Lee, Harold Gilman, Charles 
Ginner, Robert Bevan, D. Murray Smith, and 
David Muirhead, to take names at random, have 
very little in common in sentiment or technical 
methods; but through loyalty to paint they are 
all able to give you a much fuller budget of 
information about nature than would have been 
possible to either the picturesque or the Impres- 
sionist painters. Apart from any question of 
expression or decoration, then, the substitution 
of truth to paint for truth to nature as a con- 
scious aim has enabled the painter to respond 
more fully to ordinary human interests. It 
sounds paradoxical, but it is true. To put it 
into a sentence, you can learn more about places 
and natural history at the London Group or the 
New English Art Club than you can at the 
Academy. I do not say that these are primary 
objects of painting, I merely point out that 
loyalty to the paint-pot enlarges the illustrative 
and informative scope of art. But to anybody 
who has considered either the art of the Chinese 
or the art of the Middle Ages in Europe, the 
truth must be obvious. 


Chapter VIII, 


ODERN portrait painting has not 
quite recovered from the misunder- 
standing about photography. This 
is natural enough because it is in 

portraiture that the two arts are most commonly 
employed upon the same subject. The mistake 
is in supposing that they are therefore in compe- 
tition. They are not, and, except commercially, 
never could be, any more than a phonographic 
record and a biographical study of the same 


MODERN ART a 


person are in competition. It is true that so long 
as portrait painting or drawing was the only way 
of securing an accurate record of a person’s 
appearance, the painter had to burden expression 
with a great many facts; but even then he had 
the privilege of translating the facts into terms 
of his medium, and not the least merit of a great 
many portraits of the past—Holbein’s portrait 
drawings are good examples—is precisely in that 
translation. Only by the grossest misuse of 
words could a Holbein drawing be called photo- 
graphic. 

Painters do not seem to have grasped the 
entire irrelevancy of photography all at once. 
Misled by the superficial and purely accidental 
likeness between painting and photography, 
some of them abandoned their art and tried to 
meet photography on its own ground. The 
results were larger, and coloured instead of 
“plain,” but in most other respects they were 
vastly inferior to photographs—as they were 
bound to be. Phonographic records of the 
human voice are capable of great improvement, 
but they are not to be beaten “by hand.” The 
simple fact that a photograph “takes itself” 
ought to be enough to discourage all human 
attempts to rival the camera in its own field of 
activity. Still haunted by the competition idea, 
some painters tried to dodge it by doing photo- 
graphic things in elaborately unphotographic 
ways: by arranging the subject in situations and 
lights inconvenient or impossible to photography, 
_ by representing the facts inaccurately or extrava- 
gantly, or by leaving most of them out and put- 
ting in the rest in a broad, loose, and even 
sketchy manner. These diversions might be 
compared to the verbal tricks with which a man 
tries to avoid a literal effect in writing: looseness 
of construction, jocularity, or the use of slang. 
“ Slangy,” indeed, would be a fair description of 
a good many portraits produced in evasion of 
photography. It was all to no purpose, of 
course, because a portrait may be a gross cari- 
cature or without a single recognisable feature, 


and still be essentially photographic in vision and 
treatment. 

The real answer to the question: “ Wherein 
does painting differ from photography?” lurked 
in the paint-pot all the time. You cannot 
use paint characteristically and with full regard 
for all its properties for the purpose of literal 
accuracy in representation, though you can use 
it for the purpose of truth. If you ask, “ What 
sort of truth?” the answer is the sort of truth that 
is indicated by subjective vision, a flexible imple- 
ment, and a fluent and plastic material of almost 
unlimited range in colours, each of which has an 
emotional as well as a descriptive potency; that 
is to say, truth of expression. 

On the whole the portraits produced in evasion 
of photography were less admirable than those 
that tried to beat it on its own ground. That was 
a forlorn hope, but it compelled a man to honesty 
and thoroughness, and to a certain mechanical 
fidelity in drawing. Moreover, though it sup- 
pressed painting, in the sense of handling paint 
freely, it still allowed the painter one obvious 
advantage over photography: decorative colour. 
This, by the way, is one of the distinguishing 
characteristics of good pre-Raphaelite portraits. 
People often say that they look “too bright.” 
What they mean is that they are drawn and 
modelled in the spirit of literal accuracy, and 
coloured in the spirit of emotional truth. It is a 
queer reflection on human nature that the man 
who would rather die than summarize, or, as he 
would say, “falsify,” a bit of drawing will go 
cheerfully to the extreme limits of even imagina- 
tive truth in colour. He says, properly, that he 
“feels it” that way; but it never seems to occur 
to him that he has the same privilege and—if he 
is loyal to the substance as well as the colour of 
pigment—the same duty in his treatment of 
form, 

The association, I will not admit the compe- 
tition, between painting and photography in 
portraiture is so close and critical that I shall not 
apologise for labouring the distinction in order to 


38 MODERN ART 


make it clear. For this purpose it is an advan- 
tage to go outside art and appeal to life. The 
present, with its terrible toll of young lives, is 
a good time for honesty in disregard of all 
esthetic preferences, real or affected. Is there 
anybody who, robbed of a son, brother, lover, or 
friend, and given the choice between a painting 
and a photograph as the sole memorial, would 
not choose the photograph? Or, to take a less 
harrowing illustration, who would not cheerfully 
sacrifice all the painted portraits of Shakespeare 
for one authentic photograph, supposing such a 
thing were possible? 

It seems to me that the obvious answer 
implies no doubt or criticism of the truth of paint- 
ing. Nor is it that in the face of grief or of 
overwhelming interest in the personality of the 
subject art goes to the wall. It is a question of 
the sort of truth desired. Waiving all esthetic 
opinions, there is an instinctive recognition that 
the sort of truth needed as an aid to memory, or 
as a sop to overwhelming curiosity, is better 
supplied by the photograph than by the painting. 
The sort of truth conveyed by the painting is 
already established in the heart; the character of 
the beloved, the poetic personality of Shakes- 
peare, these are called up in imagination by the 
mere mention of the name. They never can be 
forgotten. It is the little accidents of feature, 
the irregularities, the irrelevancies, the hundred 
and one details of bodily appearance, that need 
renewal or acquaintance by means of the pictured 
likeness. They may have been “noticed” in 


life, but they were dulled by very familiarity; 


and it is a fact that we are more conscious of 
them in strangers than in intimates. In the case 
of Shakespeare, of course, they were never 
known to us, and we cannot get them from any 
painting or any written description, Making 
every allowance for the defects and limitations of 


photography, it is just these pricks to memory or 


imagination that the camera so perfectly pro- 
vides. 
What we instinctively desire in the painted 


portrait is not so much an aid to memory as a 
memorial in the sense of a tribute to affection, 
to genius, to beauty, to character, or to common 
worth. Truly you have to dig deep into human 
consciousness to find the essential, the ultimate 


meaning of art. In the end all art is praise of 


the Creator or of His works, and the truth is 
nowhere more securely established than in 
portraiture. Graven images were forbidden 
because the God of the Hebrews was a jealous 
God; and it is not extravagant to say that the 
prohibition ceased to apply when art became a 
praise of the Creator through the creature. In 
all real art, as distinct from imitation of appear- 
ance, God is praised in the material as He is 
praised in the dance or the sound of timbrels; 
and love being likest God, it is natural and right 
that the beloved creature should be praised; not 
flattered, least of all with the flattery of imita- 
tion; but through and by the materials and 
methods of art in their own character and 
language. 


The instinctive demand for authenticity of 


substance runs through the whole history of art, 
from the stone set up or flung upon the cairn of 


the chieftain to the ivory and gold of the minia- 


ture and its frame, The beloved or the honoured 
must be praised in something definite; there 
must be a sacrifice, and a sacrifice according to 
ritual. The magical powers of the artist are 


hired as the sacred powers of the priest are hired — 


in a Requiem. 

Often the best evidence of what art really 
means to the human mind is to be got from lowly 
sources. The man who, having asked the 
painter what were the two most expensive 
colours, decided: “Then I will be painted in 
crimson lake and my wife in ultramarine,” was 
prompted by something more than pride in 


wealth, The personal application was vulgar E 


enough, but the principle was artistically sound, 


He wanted himself and his lady to be praised in 
crimson lake and ultramarine. Again, pages of — 


argument about the difference between painting 


* 
‘ 


- —— 


MODERN ART 39 


and photography would not define it more clearly 
than the pride of simple persons in being done 
“by hand.” It is incredible that they should 
suppose it to be done more truthfully, for simple 
folk have an exaggerated belief in the truthful- 
ness of photography. Nor is the craving for 
flattery. No, it is the devotion of special skill 
and special materials to the purpose that pleases 
them. They speak of an “oil painting” with 
superstitious reverence, and in their secret minds 
they believe, correctly, that the artist will see and 
make evident something beyond the reach of any 
camera. It is human and not mechanical jus- 
tice that they want done to them; above all it is 
an interpretation of what they really are under 
all the accidents of appearance. 
is very little difference between what they want 
of the portrait painter and what they want of the 
“handwriting expert,” and it is all expressed in 
the secret longing of every child: “If they could 
only see me as I really am!” The expert’s 
reading must be put down in something perma- 
nent, and, symbolically at any rate, there could 
be no better tribute to a man from his fellow 
citizens than “his portrait in solid oils.” 

These may seem trivial illustrations, but it is 
only when ordinary people are taken off guard 
that you get at their real esthetic convictions; 
and art, by your leave, is based upon the real 
esthetic convictions of ordinary people. It 
broadens and deepens in both power and 
influence in proportion as more and more of 
them are embodied, and as they are completely 
and comfortably embodied, though there may 
be, and often is, a temporary bewilderment of 
the public while artists are feeling their way to a 
more potent formula, a fuller synthesis of ideas 
that are recognised to be common property the 
moment they are adequately expressed. This is 
only another way of saying that the chief 
business of the artist is to interpret people to 
themselves. 

The difference between portrait painting and 
photography, then, rests finally upon the fact 


In reality there’ 


that human nature wants them for entirely 
different reasons and purposes. But the rapid 
perfection of photography at a time when, 
beguiled by mastery over appearances, painting 
had rather a slack hold upon its proper business 
of expression, was bound to be disturbing and 
confusing. On the one hand the camera set up 
an entirely false though plausible standard of 
reality, and on the other portrait painters did not 
see at once that photography was relevant to 
their art only in so far as it relieved them of a 
certain responsibility which had hitherto honour- 
ably burdened expression. It might be com- 
pared to the one-time responsibility of the lyrical 
or dramatic poet to be also the precise and 
accurate historian. 

Therefore it is not surprising if a good 
many of the portraits in a modern -exhibition 
may still be classed as attempts, equally mis- 
taken, to rival or to evade the photographic 
standard of truth. No genuine effort in art, 
even if mistaken, is altogether fruitless, and 
some good results of the effort to better photo- 
graphy are increased command of the paint- 
brush, greater. economy of means, keener 
observation of character as revealed in feature 
and gesture, appreciation of costume, and 
invention in the collection and arrangement of 
“properties,” often with a distinct bearing on 
character. Painting is a mixed business, and 
while standing out for expression as the ideal 
it would be foolish to despise the amenities and 
resources of picture-making. 

And, little by little, expression is coming back 
even into portraiture. Already the more vulgar 
excesses of mere representation have practically 
disappeared from our exhibitions. Portraits no 
longer “stand out from their frames,” and the 
accident which a painted portrait may share with 
washing on a clothes-line of being mistaken for 
a real person is no longer hailed as an artistic 
virtue. Every now and then, too,. you come 
upon a portrait that is in the true tradition of 
portraiture, established long before photography 


homas Derrick — 


be 


‘a # 7 4 
i AAR ON 


“The Judgment of Paris” 


; N interesting experiment in decorative design in the 
classical manner, In the treatment of the figures 

there is a deliberate avoidance of obvious grace, with a 

repetition of profiles, as one finds on a Greek vase, 


<csepanenrecseinnmesit 


ane 


eS REAP LOIRE ry 9" 


IATA 


l 


i 


og 


P 
f 


i 4 


mut 


— 
— 
— 
=—— 
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aS 


HITT 


Plate XXV. 


— 


’ 


“glacio Zuleaee 


is "Soh Gi” > 


in ee same painter, 


n 


eS 
re 


: 
Steet ire minstrel 


JAA ATCT 


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mm tn ULL 


Plate XXVI. 


K. Ishibashi — 


“ Peonies” 


AG 


“LYERE we have the welcome survival of native instinct — 
for design and expressive workmanship under Western ~ 


training. Everything is done in a sort of artistic shorthand _ ‘ 
that leaves out nothing essential. OE Rie Kuoey. Py 


> 
~ 
* 
2 
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—ETETEEEooaeoA ccc 


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SNAINIIAAUAUATTATTAT 


Ail 


_ Oh Sha 


“Tibullus in hee 
- House of Delia” 


is ani ay the reat, Venetians, Titian in particular, 
. is See Teel confessed, But the picture 3 is. fot’ an 


the sensuous elements from “eloying. 


ie s 
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OC 


Plate XXVITi 


Good piece of écaftemanship. in pint One would 

say that for once a decorative artist had tried to see 
how close he could keep to the facts. of nature without 
"sacrificing the quality or character: of his material. _ 


is 
. 
4 
a 


ll UU 


+s 


TTL 


Za 


Augustus John 


“ “The Two Gitanas” 


Ss oer of a master of painting, ane sets down tone 

after tone with the certainty of a finished performer _ 
on a perfect instrument. — The dark > silhouettes of the 
heads are ei evoret for. their scsoratlies value, 


Ln 


AICI 


IVT 


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. Plate XXX, 


“La Mitrailleuse’ 


~ 


FINE. eaaaple of accstic’ sympathy berainen: subject A 

and treatment, It shows how realistic painting can_ 
be made even. more intense by ‘intelligent emphasis, A ‘The 
compact design and the angular treatment of shadows > 
enhance the effect of iron determination at. a CEO ge 


Plate XXXI,. 


= AAT acc , : 


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= 


a 


A | 3 


ae W. Russell - 


Sages eG) LD a 
‘ = ee 3 Se a ee ay exercise in carefully concidered: design. The form ‘ 
~ ee es Pe . “of the head-dress is distinguished in itself, and the 


_ eye follows with peculiar. satisfaction the outline from nape 
; ~ to shoulder. Everything is BF placed oF ela great discretion, 
- . e ; > Se F ; : kage Se = 


ots _ Ess of ILLINOIS © 


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at 


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litz 


. Plate XXXII. 


MODERN ART 41 


was invented, but which, at the same time, takes 
full though modest advantage of the new free- 
dom which photography has so happily defined: 
the freedom to concentrate upon interpretation 
and translation, and leave information to be 
taken for granted. 

It is noteworthy that such portraits are not as 
a rule vague or indefinite in treatment. On the 
contrary, they seem quietly to assert the inde- 
pendence of painting by accepting a full and 
explicit scheme of representation. They show 
that detail, in itself, has nothing whatever to do 
with “photographic” character. Nor has deci- 
sion of drawing. The drawing in such portraits 
is often extremely hard, approaching the linear 
treatment that gives such enduring interest to 
the portraits of the Clouets and Holbein, and the 
statement of character is often minutely ren- 
dered. But the drawing is drawing, and not a 
mere copying of shapes, and the detail is used 
for expression and decoration, and not merely as 
“facts” to convince the eye. Even in the 
special field of miniature painting there is a 
definite return to the manner of the old illu- 
minators, thus countering the bad influence of 
the photographic standard where it was most 
dangerous, and at the same time giving legiti- 
mate scope to the most precious taste in 
decorative colour. 

In subject pictures, in landscapes and in 
portraits, then, there may be observed in different 
degrees the same tendency: to confide in paint 
and frankly to accept the modifications of 
appearance that are suggested by its character- 
istic use in the expression of reality. As we 
know, the modifications are sometimes wilful 
rather than necessary, but, as a rule, they are 
not, like imitation, incompatible with the 
character of paint; and the most extreme distor- 
tions of nature have generally some real, if ill- 
digested, ideas behind them. When the ideas 
are sane and controlled by sound craftsmanship, 
as in the work of such painters as Augustus 
John, J. D. Innes, Derwent Lees, Hamilton 


Hay, J. D. Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice, 
Wolmark, C. J. Holmes, C. R. W. Nevinson, 
and Wyndham Lewis, to cover a sufficiently wide 
range of styles, the results are not only to give 
us a sharper sense of reality, but to bring art 
into a closer and more unaffected relationship 
with the other activities of the contemporary 
human mind. 

Nor is there any reason for discouragement 
because the craftsmanship of the rank and file 
is imperfect. In art, as in life, with a new con- 
ception of reality the virtues learnt in the old are 
often enough not helps but hindrances. A man 
who has been taught to base his life on keeping 
up appearances may be excused for many short- 
comings when first he tries to live by the truth 
that is in him. It is natural that he should at 
first make a clean sweep of good and bad 
together in the rules of conduct he formerly 
observed; should fail to recognise that appear- 
ances are, after all based on reality, and did at 
one time coincide with it to the best of man’s 
belief; and that the bare assertion of a principle, 
however sound, is a different thing from its con- 
vincing expression through conduct in a way that 
our fellow-creatures can understand. 

The question how far Academic training is 
necessary or helpful to the artist is too big to be 
considered here, but it is broadly true that 
Academic training, as understood, is pretty well 
summed up in the words accurate imitation of 
the appearances of nature. That the accuracy 
is compromised by something called “ style” only 
complicates the inadequacy of the training. It 
is only the painter of unusual gifts who can bend 
his Academic training to the purpose of expres- 
sion without a disconcerting break somewhere. 

To put the difficulty in a simpler form, a man 
who had spent long and patient years in learning 
to imitate the noises of a farmyard on the violin 
could not be expected all at once to employ the 
instrument effectively in playing a tune. That 
in his exasperation he should overlook the fact 
that accuracy of intonation, for whatever purpose, 


4.2 


is accuracy of intonation, and that though the 
imitation of farmyard noises is not art, their sug- 
gestion emphatically is, should surprise nobody. 
To learn the violin for expression needs harder 
work than for imitation, but it is work of a 
different kind; and for a time, at any rate, the 
former facility will seem a hindrance rather than 
a help. Exactly the same is true of painting. 
That our young painters as a body are not shirk- 
ing the new effort may be gathered from the 
prevalence in our exhibitions of still-life studies, 
which might fairly be compared to technical 
exercises on a musical instrument. 

To glance round our modern exhibition again 
from the point of view of the visitor unlearned 
in technical matters but capable of comparison, 
he will be struck by the general effect of simpler, 
clearer, and more decorative statement, brighter 
colours, flatter treatment, and more obvious 
interest in paint. I have left to the last another 
effect, due partly to all the preceding, but owing 
something to deliberate intention: a closer and 
more organic relationship between the pictures 
and the wall. 

The close connection between painting and 
architecture, if not the dependence of the former 
on the latter, is not a new discovery by any 
means; but it is a comparatively new, or newly- 
revived, ideal in practice, still rather implied 
than explicitly recognised. Exactly what it 
means needs some consideration. It does not 
mean, for example, that pictures need be painted 
on the wall, or that they should necessarily con- 
tain architectural features or even a noticeable 
proportion of rectangular forms. It means, 
rather, that some of the elements of building— 
organised function, disciplined construction and 
stability—as well as of the subject represented 
should be present in the picture. The picture, 
in fact, should be a sort of reconciliation between 
outdoors and indoors in a substance related to 
both in its capacity for both representation and 
construction, very much as domestic life itself 
at its best is neither a shutting out of the world 


MODERN ART 


nor a dragging of crude lumps of it into the 
house, but a reorganisation of the life of the 
world in terms and on the scale of private enjoy- 
ment. The picture should have manners 
adapted to the occasion; it is none the worse for 
being a little mannered. In a well-ordered 
house life moves in gradations of publicity from 
the kitchens and bedrooms to the living and 
entertaining rooms, and through the garden to 
the street or fields; but there is an organic con- 
nection all through with no effect of insincerity 
at any stage. 
tion of the house, from the crude bricks and 
mortar to the pictures on the walls, there will be 
a similar progress, fitting and seemly in all its 
gradations. 

Perhaps the meaning will become clearer if 
we translate vision into hearing. The same 
speech is used for the crude purposes of busi-' 
ness, legal argument, friendly conversation, 
considered prose, and the last rapture of lyrical 
poetry. The material—words—is the same all 
through, though used with varying degrees of 
refinement and expressiveness, At no stage 
does, or need, language degenerate into a mere 
imitation of the thing meant or lose its character 
of logical structure and consistency. Now the 
analogy is not perfect because paint is not the 
same substance or material as bricks or stone, or 
iron or wood; but it is a substance, and, apart 
from its use in pictures, it is one of the materials 
commonly used in building. Of these materials 
it is the most expressive, but it is always a 
material with a definite character and logic of 
its own. It belongs to a class that covers a range 
and variety of functions that may fairly be com- 
pared to the range and variety of functions ful- 
filled by articulate language. “ 

In the ideal house there would be an organic 
relationship between the functions of construc- 
tion, decoration, and expression. The beams 
and girders might be compared to words as used 
in business or practical affairs, doors and win- 
dows to forms of introduction and illuminating 


So in the construction and decora- 


MODERN ART 43 


remarks, furniture and utensils to friendly con- 
versation, formal decoration to considered prose, 
and pictures to lyrical or dramatic poetry. 
There would be a hierarchy of functions but a 
harmony of exercise. Not only that, but each 
material would have its rising scale of expressive- 
ness according to its powers and capacities. 
Stone would rise from support in piers and bind- 
ing in courses to flowering in sculpture, but the 
character of stone would be preserved all 
through. Bricks, however employed, would 
always be let behave in a square way, metal 
speak sharply, and wood bluntly. Paint would 
rise from the mere preservation of wood and 
metal to the forming of pleasant surfaces on its 
own account, and through decorative patterns to 
passionately articulate expression in pictures. 
They would be, so to speak, paint in a lyrical 
ecstasy, reflecting the heavens but not forgetting 
its lowlier functions nor its prerogative of articu- 
late instead of merely imitative expression. 

By implication rather than explicit claim, 
modern painting seems to be recognising this 
organic relationship between the parts and sub- 
stances of the house. The pictures hang flatter 
on the walls, and though they still represent 
appearances, they confess the substance of paint 
and the right to formal and constructive design 
determined by its character. They acknowledge 
a grammar of its own. They bring nature into 
the house, but, like a man taking off his hat and 
overcoat, they translate outdoor into indoor 
terms. 

The change in attitude is more evident if we 
go beyond actual pictures for the moment and 
remember the other household decorations of 
the Early Victorians. We laugh at them for 
treading upon real bunches of roses and paper- 
ing their walls with realistic imitations of trellised 
vines. The bad taste is more obvious but not 
really more absurd than that of the Late Vic- 
torians and Edwardians in hanging bits of raw 
nature on their walls in the form of realistic 
landscapes. What we instinctively demand, 


nowadays, in both pictures and decorative hang- 
ings and coverings, is that the landscapes and 
roses and vines should all be translated into a 
convention that is not arbitrary but determined 
partly by the nature of the materials used and 
partly by the fact that they are to be applied to 
flat surfaces with a structural meaning. In art, 
as in life, we recognise that we get no nearer to 
nature by destroying the conventions of either 
social or material architecture. Paint being a 
more expressive material than wool or cotton, the 
convention need not be so pronounced; but 
there is no art as there is no social life without 
conventions, and the more frankly they are 
employed the less they hinder expression. 


Chapter IX. 


T is always difficult to turn from the 
consideration of art to that of artists, par- 
ticularly when they are still alive. Anything 
like justice demands a long examination at 

close range, with chapter and verse at every 
stage, and in a book like this that is not possible. 
We must be content with a hasty glance at some 
contemporary figures, taking the full risk that 
immediate reputation will sometimes obscure 
lasting merit. Also it must be conceded frankly 
that the most contemporary figure in time is not 
always the most contemporary in character. 

If range, productiveness, and versatility be 
taken into account, probably the most important 
figure in modern British art is Mr. Frank 
Brangwyn, A.R.A. Certainly that seems to be 
the opinion on the Continent; and though the 
fame of an artist outside his own country does 
not depend exclusively upon the quality of his 
work, international reputation is a fair indication 
of relative size. For one thing Mr. Brangwyn’s 
work, with its merits and defects, is very charac- 
teristically English. It is excessively romantic, 
inclined to be rhetorical, careless in detail— 


4.4. MODERN ART 


though patient and thorough in preparation— 
and resourceful to the point of opportunism. 
Moreover, in spite of Mr. Brangwyn’s Welsh 
ancestry, it is English in the broad, general sense 
of the word to a foreigner; the sense in which 
Fielding, Scott, Stevenson, Dr. Johnson, 
Dickens, and Mr. G. K. Chesterton are English, 
though two at least of them were Scotsmen. 
Technically, no doubt, Mr. Brangwyn owes 
something to his birth abroad and cosmopolitan 
training, and he has a distinct affinity with 
Rubens; but the flourish of his drawing and the 
fatness of his paint are both in the English tradi- 
tion. Rowlandson and Morland, to name no 
others, are both in his ancestry. 

The particular significance of Mr. Brangwyn 
as a modern artist from the point of view of this 
book is twofold. He transcends in his work all 
distinctions between pictorial and decorative 
painting, and, practising a full range of arts and 
crafts, he shows in every case an intense appre- 
ciation of the medium. If he has to make a 
drawing for a newspaper, his first care is to find 
out the quality of the actual paper upon which 
it is to be printed; and when he decorates the 
Skinners’ Hall he finds a response in his paint 
as well as in his designs to the moral atmosphere 
and material character of the building. A good 
part of his inspiration is the inspiration of the 
stuff, and this really explains what has been 
regarded as a defect in his treatment of etching. 
He has invented an etching in which a large 


tion. 

Allowing for individual temperament, in his 
artistic attitude to life Mr. Brangwyn belongs to 
the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. 
Take his favourite theme of labour. He paints 
the labourer with insight and sympathy but with 
no misgivings about the terms of his employ- 
ment. Now it is not the business of the artist to 
preach economics or sociology, but every con- 
siderable artist who paints labour does reflect 
some general ideas on the subject; and Mr. 


scale and a rugged line are parts of the conven- 


Brangwyn unconsciously flatters the nineteenth- 
century fallacy that a lot of men on the job is a 
proof of progress. The twentieth century wants 
to know more about the job, and who is being 
exploited. So, too, in his treatment of inanimate 
nature Mr. Brangwyn is more concerned with 
picturesque accidents than with essential charac- 
ter, with the drama of light and shade rather 
than with logic of structure. He paints what 
somebody called “the pageant of life,” and we 
have come to believe that, not only morally but 
esthetically, the important thing is what goes on 
behind the pageant. ) 

These characteristics of Mr. Brangwyn’s art 
are not quoted as defects—they may be virtues— 
but only as helping to place it with regard to the 
time-spirit. Nobody with an eye in his head 
and a heart in his body can fail to be moved by 
this great artist’s joy in the pageant of life, and - 
its large and passionate expression with unfailing 
sympathy and knowledge in so many different 
materials; and on the whole we may be glad 
that Mr. Brangwyn has kept his illusions. In 
his gusto for life, delight in action, and keen 
sense of the romance of the road, with its great 
moments of buildings and bridges, he might be 
compared to R. L. Stevenson. 

A conception of labour, at any rate of field 
labour, that is essentially modern is expressed in 
the work of Mr. George Clausen, R.A. It is 
not so much, as in J. F. Millet, the tragedy as 
the mystical significance of man’s bondage to 
the soil. To call it Greek would not be far 
wrong, for it is the same conception that is 
expressed in the story of Demeter and Perse- 
phone—that forms, indeed, the whole basis of 
Greek mythology, and, possibly, of all religions. 
The modern parallel in literature is to be found 
in the work of Mr. Thomas Hardy; and the work 
of Mr. Clausen is the more Greek in that with 
equal fatalism there is not the same protest 
against Fate. Probably in the modern painter 
the Greek affinity and the likeness to the modern 
novelist are both equally unconscious; but his 


MODERN ART 45 


young women are none the less nymphs and 
dryads, with sap in their veins and woodland 
roughness on their cheeks, and none the less 
true sisters to Tess of the D’Urbervilles and 
Marty South. The philosophy implied in his 
work is redeemed from “neo-Pantheism” by 
being derived from a profound study of the pro- 
cesses of nature and not from literature. Nor 
does it need persons for its expression, nor any 
fanciful distortion of the things of nature. A 
bare corn-field in Essex by Mr. Clausen still 
hides Persephone, and the dryads of his oaks 
are felt through very insistence upon the charac- 
ter of the trees. How real and true is this 
philosophy when distilled from nature has been 
brought home to us by the war; for now, if ever, 
we recognise that in the last resort humanity rests 
upon sowing and reaping, and upon nothing 
else. Significantly enough, it is Mr. Clausen 
who has given us the one picture that can be 
called an imaginative interpretation of the war: 
“ Renaissance,” in the Academy of 1915; and 
the idea expressed in it is the triumph of the 
silent processes of nature over all the destructive 
work of man. 

Technically an interesting comparison, show- 
ing a step forward, can be made between the 
work of Mr. Clausen and that of the French 
Impressionists, by whom he has been influenced. 
A favourite motive of his is one that was often 
painted by both Monet and Pissarro: the pris- 
matic effect of sunlight coming through foliage 
into the eyes of the spectator. But whereas the 
Frenchmen were concerned mainly to get a 


convincing illusion, Mr. Clausen, with an even 


more patient skill, is concerned only with the 
esthetic, the magical value of the phenomenon. 
There is no attempt at illusion, the only care 
from a realistic point of view being to make the 
effect explain itself. Nor is there any apparent 
attempt to prove anything—the lurking powder 
in the jam of most Impressionist work. Allow- 
ing the question of truth to be taken for 
granted, the modern painter need not ignore the 


character of solid objects in his pre-occupation 
with light; and, above all, he is free to employ 
the supreme magic of design. The firm, close- 
trimmed designs of Mr. Clausen, with something 
of Cotman’s “slow line” in their treatment of 
natural forms, give to his pictures a remarkable 
stability. They are truly architectural, and, as 
he has shown already, the transition to purely 
decorative painting for him is only a matter of 
technical application with no change of style or 
feeling. No painter of his age is more abreast 
of modern ideas, and in his water-colours, at any 
rate, he has adopted the more boldly synthetic 
treatment of nature associated with post- 
Impressionism. 

In the work of Mr. Arnesby Brown, R.A., we 
have a landscape as free from ulterior motives, 
theories, and even philosophy, as any painting 
could be. It is distinctively modern, however, 
in one important respect. Mr. Brown is not a 
great designer, but there never was a- painter 
whose designs were more truly inspired by paint. 
They grow out of the paint-pot as a plant grows 
out of seed. The organic relationship between 
his brushwork and his designs gives to his 
pictures a logic of construction that they would 
otherwise lack, and, from a technical point of 
view, detaches them from the nineteenth-century 
naturalistic school, to which they are related in 
feeling. Their great value as artistic propa- 
ganda is that they help the “nature lover” into 
an appreciation of painting without his knowing 
it. The broadly bucolic interest of their subjects 
makes them all the better for the purpose. 
Painting in the same counties, with a special 
turn for cattle, Mr. Brown is our most direct 
descendant of Constable, and his work is a good 
illustration of how a traditional form of art may 
still respond to contemporary influences. For, 
particularly in his careful studies of twilight, Mr. 
Brown pursues in a peculiarly well-digested form 
the interests of later Impressionism, with special 
reference to the esthetic rather than the realistic 
problem. It is a very healthy and thoroughly 


4.6 MODERN ART 


British strain that Mr. Arnesby Brown carries 
forward into contemporary painting. 

Mr. William Strang, A.R.A., with his racy 
comments on contemporary life, realistic in 
detail but frankly decorative in colour and 
design; Mr. William Orpen, A.R.A., with his 
Hogarthian studies of character set out in an 
exquisite grammar of tone; Mr. D. Y. Cameron, 
A.R.A., with his emphasis upon mood and struc- 
ture in landscape; Mr. Adrian Stokes, A.R.A., 
with his decorative interpretations of mountain 
scenery; Mr. Charles Sims, A.R.A., with his 
true fairy-tales, just lacking the courage of com- 
plete translation into fairy-like terms called for 
by his delicious paint; Mr. Charles Shannon, 
A.R.A., with his brooding absorption in the 
elements of material beauty; and Mr. Edward 
Stott, A.R.A., with his poetical and intensely 
subjective, and therefore contemporary, readings 
of sacred history, are all artists who, belonging to 
the past by birth and reputation, carry over into 
any catholic consideration of modern painting. 

A book dealing with modern art is bound to 
regard the Royal Academy as the shrine of 
yesterday, though, as the above names will 
indicate, it has open doors to the present. It is 
not in the nature of things that an academy shall 
include the figure, or figures, that express the 
special significance of the moment. 

Certainly it is so in the present case. Of all 
the considerable figures in modern British art, 
the one that sums up the present most com- 
pletely and consistently in both spirit and 


technical methods is that of Mr. Augustus John. | 


In both spirit and manner he starts “from 
scratch,” owing no more tothe past than 1s 
indicated by the continuity of human conscious- 
ness and the continuous character of the art of 
painting. | ‘5 

The true significance of Mr. John is obscured 


rather than otherwise by the fact that he enjoys © 


not only the appreciation of artists but a fashion- 
able reputation and at least a popular notoriety. 
The reputation and the notoriety depend mainly 


upon irrelevant considerations: the queerness of 
some of his types and subjects, and a supposed 
revolutionary character in his ideas among them. 
The real importance of Mr. John is due to the 
fact that, reducing the arts to their essentials, he 
can draw and paint better than anybody else on 
the principles that we now recognise as funda- 
mental in the arts of drawing and painting. 

Let us try to define what those principles are. 
In order to do this we must get back to the 
origins of drawing and painting, not in human 
history, which would be impossible, but in 
human practice. Drawing and painting begin 
with scrawls and daubs; with the child’s scrawl 
on the slate and the child’s daub of colour on 
the print; and the intention in both cases is 
expressive rather than imitative. The record is 
not so much of the thing seen as of the thing 
felt in all the bones and muscles and bowels of 
the child. It is obvious that the matter cannot 
rest there. The scrawl and daub must be 
refined and amplified by knowledge and cor- 
rected by observation; but—and this is the 
crucial thing in the whole business—if they are to 
remain art there must be no substitution of an 
imitative for an expressive purpose. Also, 
though the scrawl and the daub must be brought 
into a more subtle relation, the elements of 
drawing and painting must be kept distinct and 
not confused in a sort of scatter-gun attempt at 
representation. “Penny plain and twopence 
coloured” is an zsthetic as well as a commercial 
distinction. 

We know what happens to the ordinary child, 
and the exhibitions of the Royal Drawing 
Society, with their almost painful evidence of 
the universal purity of early efforts, provide us 
with plenty of material for study. Little by 
little, unless he is almost savagely protected 
from bad example, the child forgets all about 
expression in imitation. He learns to make a 
more or less accurate copy of what he sees or 
has seen; and the latter efforts are only better 
than the former in being simpler and more 


MODERN ART 47 


confined to essentials. Neither convey what the 
child, or by this time the youth, has felt about 
the matter in his bones and in terms of the 
material he is using. 

Somebody said the other day that the notion 
that music has anything to do with the ear is 
a comparatively modern heresy. I often think 
that the same is true about the connection 
between painting and the eye, and that it would 
be an advantage to art if painters were blind— 
as Beethoven was deaf. How far the child, 
under necessary training, can be taught to use 
his eyes as a channel and refuse them as a critic 
of reality is a difficult question to answer; but 
the whole of Eastern art, and particularly 
Chinese, seems to show that the difficulty dis- 
appears in practice; that the pupil can be taught 
to translate appearance into feeling with the 
material all the time. 

90 it is with Mr. John. With all the differ- 
ence in truth, fulness and refinement between 
his drawing and painting and the scrawls and 
daubs of the child there is no change in 
principle; the aim is always expression, and 
there is always complete translation of the thing 
seen into terms of the material employed. I 
know nothing about his training, but there is 
no indication that at any stage he corrupted the 
purity of the child’s method with the pride of 
the eye. Consequently he can apply the 
method at many different removes from nature; 
can draw close to or far from appearances; can 
bring the elements of drawing and painting into 
close relationship by means of modelling in a 
realistic portrait, or can expose their separate 
concerns with careless freedom in a panel study 
of the figure in landscape. But in the most 
realistic portrait the contours are translated and 
not imitated from nature, and there is always a 
definite notation in the scale of tones used in 
modelling, with an esthetic as well as a prac- 
tical purpose in their sequence and combination. 
Finally, to strip the business of painting, on the 
technical side, to the buff, there is nobody who 


- occasional 


can plant a general tone with the truth and 
precision of Mr. John. He can do it with the 
brightest object, an orange scarf in a green field, 
without making two bites at his cherry. Put 
there, it stops there, accepting its position in 
space without the need for any explanatory 
shading or doctoring of the edges. This, if 
you come to think of it, is a test of painting in its 
fundamentals. More than any other modern 
painter, Mr. John is always in the middle of the 
note. 

In spirit his work is equally, though less 
obviously, an expression of contemporary ideas. 
He seems to live habitually on that plane of 
consciousness between thinking and feeling 
which is the peculiar playground of the time- 
spirit as it is the reservoir of creative impulse. 
He “places” the art of painting somewhere 
between music and poetry; as more objec- 
tive than the one and less articulate than 
the other; which is in accord with modern 
feeling on the subject. It is the ground- 
work of landscape, hills and valleys rather 
than trees or atmospheric effects, and the 
elementary in human type and gesture, that 
hold his attention. Often it would be difficult 
to assign a definite meaning to his pictures, but 
they always seem to have a meaning, probably 
beyond his own exposition in words; and the 
curious thing is that the meaning generally 
seems to be on the side of what sensitive and 
more articulate minds are trying to formulate as 
contemporary gospel. As a rule, when Mr. 
John stops to think he thinks wrong—or at any 
rate perversely ; and this partly accounts for his 
attraction for the more sophisticated public. 
Probably the true explanation of Mr. John is 
that he is our dumb Platonist in paint, exclu- 
sively concerned to express general ideas and 
feelings as they come to the surface at the 
bidding of the time-spirit and indifferent to 
particular contemporary phenomena. His 
unguarded reflection of earlier 
painters, such as Botticelli, is rather a proof of 


William Orpen, A.R.A.. 


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_MASTERLY piece of painting. The least error in tone 
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material itself being so evenly distributed, with no prominent’ 
object to form a centre, Everything is done with great 
consistency, the different textures and surfaces being 

* indicated without spoiling the uniform quality of the paint, = 
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Plate XXXVIII. 


G. Spencer 


“ The “Hobby Horse” : 


‘HE irresistible joyousness of ‘this painting ‘recalls. Phe. 
poems of Blake. To the imagination of the spectator, — 
as to that of the child, the hobby horse becomes much more 


real than a living steed. 


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ucien Pissarro _ 


a ‘Sea View, FB ishponds” 


HIS picaire illustrates he further. geyaibeinnene of 

Impressionism ; faithful presentation | of the. facts — a 
being combined with attention to design, | What at first — ae 
sight appears to be a literal rendering of the scene is full 
-of careful selection and arrangement, The turn: of ‘the | 
valley comes at exactly the right aniorent to date the eye 
perven the picture. 


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Plate XL, 


his modernity than otherwise, since modern life 
is full of recognitions of affinities in the past. 

Naturally enough, Mr. John is one of the only 
two contemporary painters who can be said to 
have founded a school. How far they were or 
are actual pupils of his I do not know; but the 
late Mr. J. D. Innes, the late Mr. John Currie, 
Mr. Derwent Lees, Mr. Leslie Brockhurst, Mr. 
Harold Squire, Mr. C. J. Holmes, Mr. A. P. 
Allinson, and several others, have all been at 
least touched with his influence. 

The other contemporary painter who can be 
said to have founded a school, and with more 
definite effects, is Mr. Walter Sickert. If 
Mr. John is our Platonist, Mr. Sickert is 
emphatically our Aristotelian in paint. The 
respective degree of realism indicated by the 
names is paralleled in technical practice. 
Equally true to paint with Mr. John, in the 
matter of tone Mr. Sickert prefers to make two 
or more bites at his cherry; but they are distinct 
bites, and not a mere mumbling. There is a 
definite notation in the scale of tones, but, in 
keeping with a more particular treatment of 
nature, the intervals are smaller. Correspond- 
ingly, it is the particular phenomena rather than 
the general ideas of our epoch that Mr. Sickert 
more deliberately sets out to express. 

The more I think about Mr. Sickert, the more 
I am filled with a respect approaching to venera- 
tion. With little popular appreciation, though 
_ the admiration of all artists, but with perfect 
urbanity edged with irony, Mr. Sickert goes on 
adding comment to comment on what may be 
called, esthetically at any rate, the seamier side 
of contemporary life. It would be difficult to 
imagine more ungrateful material for the painter 
unless, as Hogarth did and Mr. Sickert does 
not, he organises his comments to point a moral. 
And every now and then, in the head of an old 
Venetian woman, a study of Belgian soldiers, 
or a landscape, Mr. Sickert shows that a tender 
sympathy, a passionate enthusiasm, and a 
lyrical enjoyment of nature are all within his 


MODERN ART 49 


range of emotions. It is difficult to resist the 
conclusion that he devotes himself to his dustier 
task from a sense of duty, all the more sincere 
and self-sacrificing for being disguised as 
curiosity. Not that the curiosity is not genuine ; 
and indeed Mr. Sickert shows marked afhnities 
with the realistic novelists: with Fielding and, 
especially, Mr. George Moore. He made, I 
think, some drawings to Esther Waters; at 
any rate, a good deal of his work is in the spirit 
of that novel. How much or how little he 
would claim to derive from Whistler I do not 
know; but he is made of much sterner stuff. He 
stands up to nature, and so far from painting 
her in the dusk with the light behind her, 
positively prefers the revelations of clear, grey 
mornings with an East wind blowing. 

Mr. Sickert is the “sea-green incorruptible.” 
of modern art. Perhaps his function is to keep a 
hand on the brake. of expression lest art should 
run away into generalisations before it has made 
sure of its ground by the study of particulars. 
Certainly that seems to be his influence upon 
the band of young men and women who, without 
exaggeration, owe everything to him. Prac- 
tically the whole of that section of the. London 
Group which was formerly associated with 
Camden Town has passed through his hands 
or sat at his feet; and the more recent develop- 
ment of some of its members shows that his 
grounding in essentials did no injury to talents 
of the most various kinds. He might be com- 
pared to the Wise Centaur. I firmly believe 
that when the history of immediately modern 
att comes to be written, as it cannot be written 
here, in respect of solid craftsmanship it will 
be found to owe more to Mr. Walter Sickert 
than to anybody else. : 

The most fruitful results of post-Impres- 
sionism, in the broader sense, are to be found 
in the works of the group of painters who at one 
time called themselves “ Fauvistes,’ comprising 
Mr. S. J. Peploe, Mr. J. D. Fergusson, Mr. 
Joseph Simpson, and Miss Anne Estelle Rice; 


50 MODERN 


and in those of Mr. Wyndham Lewis and Mr. 
C. R. W. Nevinson. In the former the digested 


principles resolve themselves into emphatic 


and strongly rhythmical design, simplified and 
boldly linear treatment of form, and use of 
bright colour in flat patterns with a decorative 
purpose and a frank exposition of the substance 
of paint. Except as implied in these transla- 
tions, the appearances of nature are not greatly 
modified. Both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Nevinson 
tend to a greater abstraction, with a geometrical 
grammar; the aim being as much to symbolize 
dynamic energy as to enhance the reality of solid 
objects. As examples of the complete digestion 
of new principles, the war paintings of Mr. 
Nevinson are particularly satisfying. They are 
comparatively realistic representations reinforced 


with the logic of energy and structure that is felt . 


by the mind though not perceived by: the eye. 
Other painters who are producing interesting 
works in the newer conventions are Mr. W. B. 
Adeney, Mr. Frederick Etchells, Mr. W. 
Roberts, and Mr. Edward Wadsworth. 


Chapter X. 


HEN all has been said, the 
problem of art is to make a noise 
like a turnip. As Mr. Punch’s 
lunatic was well aware, the only 

effective substitute for a real turnip is to create 
one in the mind of the intended victim; and, 
being a lunatic, he chose the extreme form of 
artistic creation—by sound. But sound, smell, 
shape or colour, the principle is exactly the 
same; you must catch your rabbit by hypnotic 
suggestion, by magic, and not by intellectual 
persuasion. | 

Of all substitutes for the real turnip the least 
effective is the realistic imitation. The rabbit 
looks at it and says: “ M’yes, very pretty; but 
I’m eating grass myself.” This is not mere con- 


| like this. 


ART 


trariness; it is part of the mystery of mind. For 
any vital result in art you must hit below the 
belt of conscious perception. It is not that the 
human mind—the rabbit of the artistic problem 
—1is not susceptible to reason, but that it is too 
susceptible. It will take all your reasons and 
ask for more, and then yawn and go home to tea. 
The soul of artistic strategy is to kill “ Why?” 
dead on the lips. Otherwise you get something 
The rabbit looks at the realistic 
imitation of the turnip and says: “Yes, that 
looks very like a turnip, but why doesn’t it smell 
or taste or feel like one, or sound like one when 
you tap it?” Of course there was the immortal 
Brer Rabbit and the sparrer-grass; but then, if 
you remember, it was real sparrer-grass. 

I am not playing with the subject. It is the 
sober truth that a good painter can suggest, and 
simultaneously, not only the look but the move- 
ments, the sounds, the smells, the general “ feel” 
of a windy day; but he cannot do it by optical 
accuracy alone. On the contrary, the more 
accurate the optical impression the more con- 
spicuous will be the tactile, auditory and 
olfactory impressions by their absence; and you 
get the effect of looking at the landscape from 
an hermetically-sealed glass compartment. For 
a long time I wondered why in front of some 
realistically-painted landscapes I felt as if my 
ears were stopped. You can test this any day 
at the movies, and it is in recognition of the 
truth that sometimes at the movies the sounds 
are independently supplied. The painter has 
to supply them in paint. In practice, and with- 
out reasoning it out, he does it by pooling all his 
impressions, optical, auditory, tactile and olfac- 
tory, and painting the net result—his general 
“feeling” of the scene—and with reasonable 
skill he makes the observer feel the same. 

At all times the general tendency of art has 


been to abstract the “feeling” from the sum of 


impressions, and to concentrate its technical 
powers on finding a formula, a spell, to convey 
it fully, forcibly and directly. The aim is to 


ae 4. ae 


MODERN ART 51 


convey directly the “go” of the engine, the 
“soar” of the kite, the “grin” of the cat; and, 
moreover, the secret aspiration of art has always 
been to convey the grin without the cat, or with 
as little of the cat as may be. And in one art, 
at any rate, that of music, the aspiration is ful- 
filled every day. From the nature of his 
medium, of all artists the musician is most suc- 
cessful in baulking reason, in killing “ Why?” 
dead on the lips; and that, no doubt, is why 
Mr. Punch’s lunatic said a “ noise ” like a turnip. 
Only in music can the pure turnipness of the 
turnip be conveyed without reference to its mortal 
accidents. In our present state of sensibility it is 
not yet possible in painting; but—and this more 
than justifies the aspiration—all art, of whatever 
kind, is art only in proportion as the grin sur- 
vives the cat, as the turnipness of the turnip 
transcends its accidental and incidental features. 

Therefore, with all its faults and follies of 
application, post-Impressionism—using the term 
inclusively—was right on general principles; 
and with all its too sanguine anticipation of 
human faculty it did show the direction in which 
painting must progress. The word “ progress ” 
is used here advisedly. It may be questioned if 
painting qua painting can improve upon its past. 
There can be no doubt that it can become a 
more complete and authentic expression of life. 
Otherwise not only the principles of zsthetics 
but the promises of religion are meaningless. 
The condition of our becoming liker God, which 
is the central precept of all religions, is that our 
powers and capacities shall become liker them- 
selves, which means a closer identity between 
life and its expression. This is a commonplace 
of every department of life. Better government 
is more representative government, liker man; 
and the ultimate aim of all improvements in 
machinery for the purpose is the abolition of 
machinery; the gradual reform of every insti- 
tution that hinders the expression of human 
nature. Translated into terms of art this means 
the closer identity of form with substance; the 


gradual disappearance of every theory of like- 
ness that hinders expression of the stuff. 

But, and this is where the difficulties arise in 
art, it does not mean the disappearance of con- 
ventions. Rather the reverse. Progress in art 
means the discovery of more and more potent 
conventions, of a more powerful magic or “ medi- 
cine ” distilled from the nature of the stuff. That 
is why it is not necessary to discriminate between 
the various “isms” covered by post-Impres- 
sionism. They were, and are, all attempts at 
more potent formulas or conventions to express 
the conception of reality that followed the rejec- 
tion of realism. Abandoning the cat you have 
to find a formula that will contain the grin. The 
chief defect of most of the “isms” was that the 
formulas were not found in the nature of the 
stuff. They were invented, and so the grin 
escaped, and there was no cat to fall back upon. 

But movements in art do not happen before 
they are necessary, and the best defence of post- — 
Impressionism is that it did not happen before. 
In an age of faith in reality it was not needed, 
and that is why some of the principles of post- 
Impressionism are found comfortably embodied 
in the Italian Primitives and in the paintings of 
the Chinese. Their conventions in art were 
universally accepted and understood. More- 
over, they were traditional, and so a suitable 
technique was developed with them. That is 
the right answer to people who complain that 
the post-Impressionists paint so badly. In 
despair at unbelief they had to invent formulas 
and improvise a technique at the same time. 
Strictly speaking, you cannot do either; both 
must come out of serene faith in reality and 
patient familiarity with the material on its own 
merits, and not merely according to what it can 
be made to “do.” 

The words “formula” and “convention” are 
stumbling-blocks, I know. There is a notion 
that the individual artist can express reality in a 
sort of spasm of inspiration, like a confession at 
a revival meeting. This is the fallacy of “ wood- 


Se Ord AS ae ee ee at 


52 MODERN ART 


notes wild.” Asa matter of cold fact, I believe 
I am right in saying that wood-notes are any- 
thing but wild, but that on the contrary they are 
much more conventional and according to a 
formula than anything in human art. At any rate 
I have not observed any confusion between the 
blackbird and the thrush, nor any wide variation 
between one individual blackbird and another. 
But the important thing to remember is that, so 
far as we can judge, the formula or convention of 
the respective song is determined by the whole 
character of the instrument that produces it, not 
merely in quality and pitch of tone, but in range 
and sequence of notes. As a rough-and-ready 
indication of what an artistic convention should 
be, “wood-notes wild” might well be recom- 
mended. Nobody can deny that the blackbird 
sings “naturally,” or complain that his conven- 
tion is “arbitrary”; and it is precisely and only 
the convention that allows his art to be “ unpre- 
meditated.” 

As for that vexed question of “ personality,” 
it seems to me that a convention is the only form 
in which personality can be expressed. Other- 
wise you get mere incoherency. The most 
divinely-inspired person can only express him- 
self to any purpose in articulate language, which 
is a convention of definite symbols in a definite 
order; and the tendency of prophets has always 
been to express themselves in parables, which 
are the strictest conventions. The essential 
thing is that the convention shall be based upon 
the real character of the medium or material in 
which the message is delivered. It need bear 
only a formal relationship to the subject of the 
message. The weakness of what we call con- 
ventional behaviour is that it pays far too much 
attention to appearances, and far too little to 
human nature, which is the medium in this cake: 
and exactly the same applies to conventional art 


in the bad sense of stale or commonplace art. 


Fashions in dress are true conventions, and no 
woman with a scrap of personality ever found 
any difficulty in adapting a fashion to her indivi- 


dual type. On the other hand the occasional 
attempts one sees to dress in direct expression 
of personality without regard to fashion are not 
encouraging. 

Progress in art, then, is progress from one 
convention to another, and so long as the con- 
vention is a more complete and sympathetic 
expression of the material, the progress is real. 
That is what strikes me as hopeful in modern 
painting. Our pictures are at least no further 
from nature, in the sense of reality, and they are 
much nearer to paint. Also, they are a much 
more direct expression of our lives in spirit, and 
they are much more closely related to the 
material context of our lives in its particulars of 
building and furnishing. Whether the art itself 
be better or worse, it is not so much “ stuck on” 
as it was in the nineteenth century. Probably it 
is not so real, or close to life, or true to paint 
as it was from the twelfth to the fifteenth 
century; but the problems are much more difh- 
cult. In the interval we lost our faith in reality, 
and are only now beginning to find it again. 
We forgot work in business, and the nature of 
things in frantic exploitation of the things of 
nature ; and we are only now beginning to recog- 
nise that society rests upon work and not upon 
business, and that the character of work is deter- 
mined by the nature of the stuff; whether it be 
human nature or the properties of wood and 
stone and iron and wool. We cannot go back 
to the age of simple faith and the effortless unity 
of life that proceeded from it, but we can bring 
back our more accomplished art into closer rela- 
tions with our infinitely more complex condi- 
tions; and apparently we are doing so with better 
success than at any time since the Middle Ages. 
What was done then in the spirit of the day’s 
work we are doing now in the spirit of chastened 
understanding. We may not yet believe, but 
we have learnt the lessons of unbelief, and we 
have exploded most of the intellectual fallacies 
that kept religion and science and art in separate 
compartments. We are finding our synthesis. 


MODERN ART 53 


As for the future, I believe, personally, that 
our conventions in art will become even more 
definite and formal. The subject-matter of 
painting will remain pretty much as always: life ; 
but since as a result of our newer knowledge we 
are dealing more with the spirit than the acci- 
dents of life, our forms of expression will be 
more and more determined by the forms of sub- 
stance ; which are the only forms that we can now 
regard as reasonably permanent. The question 
asked will be not, “Is it true to nature?” which 
nobody is competent to answer, but, “Is it true 
to stone or wood or iron or paint as we know it? ” 
One of the paradoxes of materialism, by the way, 
was its contempt for materials. Only the spiri- 
tualist can really enjoy the stuff. 

But I do not think that we shall have again 
anything like the more extravagant conventions 
of post-Impressionism. They will not be 
necessary. Even in the last five or six years 
the truths they over-emphasised have become 
commonplaces to people of ordinary sensibility. 
Since nobody that matters believes them to be 
reality, we need no longer be Puritanical about 
appearances, and we can indulge in the fullest 
representation with a light heart. But we shall 
treat appearances with a light hand, without the 
snuffling Pharisaism, the “te-rewth, my breth- 
ren,” of the nineteenth century; our chief care 
being to preserve reality of substance. Like 
the weavers of the Bayeux Tapestry we shall 
have no hesitation in making the principal figure 
twice as big as the others, knowing that it is far 
truer to do so than to pretend a conspiracy of 
circumstances or of the elements, or to degrade 
the beauty of paint with convincing light and 
shade in order to bring him into pictorial relief. 
We shall have no truck with accidents to justify 
effective “composition,” but will frankly design. 
If, as I hope not, anybody paints “ the Angels of 
Mons,” he will paint them as angels, and not 
hedge by leaving it open to suppose that they 
were partly an effect of light upon a cloud. 


There will be no more optical illusions. Even 
that blessed word “selection,” which was really 
studio-shop for “very like a whale,” will be dis- 
credited. Instead of selecting our artistic mean- 
ing from among phenomena, like a cat among 
eggshells, we shall boldly impose it upon them ; 
but never, never upon the stuff. For appear- 
ances and phenomena are only a bag of samples 
at any man’s disposal; but the stuff is sacred. 
What it amounts to from a practical point of 
view is that painting is becoming more highly 
specialised, less vaguely and generally “art, 
with all sorts of moral, zsthetic and sentimental 
axes to grind, and more definitely painting; and 
if you think it over this is a natural consequence, 
or at least accompaniment, of the dissolution of 
artificial barriers between one department of life 
and art and another. Community of interest 
and specialisation of function go hand in hand, 
and nothing keeps the cobbler from his last like 
artificial segregation for ulterior purposes. The 
denial of this truth, by the way, is one of the 
stock arguments against Socialism: that it would 
reduce everybody to a dead level. Exactly the 
contrary is true, and it is only when common 
necessities are more or less automatically ful- 
filled that uncommon abilities get a chance of 
development. So long as individuals, or indus- 
tries, have to keep one eye on the others to see 
what they are up to, anything like true specialisa- 
tion is impossible. The essence of competition 
is that everybody shall be like everybody else— 
only a little more so. This is amusingly illus- 
trated in the publishing world, where every new 
picture paper or magazine has to be exactly like 
all the others. The arts were never more highly 
specialised than in the Middle Ages, when a 
healthy community of interests was established 
in the industrial world by means of the Trade 
Guilds. We are far enough, unfortunately, 
from healthy conditions in the industrial world, 
but at least we are coming to recognise that a 
community of interests is the first consideration. 


PI 


54. MODERN ART ° 


Whether the renewed specialisation of painting 
be looked upon as an effect or a cause, it is un- 
doubtedly connected with the more enlightened 
conception of human society. It is recognised 
that all distinctions must be based upon the 
nature of the stuff, and not upon interested 
exploitations of it, however lofty the purpose may 
seem. With the disappearance of the old arbi- 
trary distinctions between decorative, pictorial 
and applied art, between the designer and the 
craftsman, and of the anxious preoccupation of 
the artist with truth to nature according to some- 


body’s opinion, all as much commercial as 
esthetic, painting is able to devote itself more 
single-heartedly to its proper business of hand- 
ling paint. And, to rise from the practical to 
the spiritual, if there is any difference, nothing 
could be more promising for the future of art in 
its higher aspect. All art is praise, and the 
meaning of Omnia Opera is that every creature 
must be allowed to sing in its own convention. 
Universal harmony can only result from univer- 
sal freedom of expression; and with perfect 
expression the end of art is fulfilled. | 


Albert Besnard 


Portrait of Miss B— 


Y one of the most famous French painters of women 
who makes a special study of opposed lights, warm 
and cold. With this mastery of conditions he combines 
great power of decorative design—as may be seen in the 
illustration. Besnard is fond of working in mixed mediums, 
This picture looks as if it were done in water-colour and 


pastel. 


— 
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Plate XLII 


“The Wild Swans ” 


we 


SS interesting ‘translation bot “Northern legend in to 
Southern atmosphere—as- if a Folk Song were ‘done 
into Latin verse. Colour and emotion are both deepened, — 


and the meaning of the picture is summed up in the gesture 
of farewell. 


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Reginald B. 


“ Almas sees the Princess’ 


AL THOROUGHLY entertaining work, in cee aha 


detail. The atmosphere of an Eastern tale is ad- 


mirably suggested, and we are ‘made to share in the | 
astonished delight of Almis at the sight of the > Princess, 


fo 


SN NAA HI 


x . Set Plate XLV. 


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Be Ne, qaenn | Plate XLVI. 


> 7 

Ernest Procter: 11. 

o> Ee Virgin of the Elarbour . 
A CHARACTERISTIC modern otlernpe to ‘re-capture oa ey ei 

the simplicity of the Italian Primitives. Realistic 
illusion is not aimed at, the emotional meaning being | be 
expressed in design, ieee and enloats me 
¢ - 
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We ae Shepherd hears 
: Qe, Dawn" 


ie { the light welling up from below ris well suggested, 
ms bon | Plate XLVI eich 


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Plate XLVIII. 


MODERN ART 


By “TIS” 


Chapter I. 


T the crown of the latest school of 
thought is a French Jew philosopher, 
Bergson; at its root was a German 
Pole, the most widely misunderstood 
thinker—it 1s not clear that he understood him- 
seli—who ever stalked through the jungle of 
human thought, Nietzsche. It was the latter 
who gave the signal for the great overthrow of 
our standards of civilization; by his transvalua- 
tion of all values, he overturned the scales; it 
was the former who took away the weights. 
Science has become metaphysicalosophic, Philo- 
sophy has become religious, and Religion, which 
was once both, is now neither—Chaos! 

But in order to get at the cause of her 
troubles nature is conducting a most interesting 
analytical experiment, consisting in a plentiful 
application of nitric acid, physically in the form 
of high explosives, metaphysically in an universal 
desire for separation. Accordingly, we human 
beings are for the moment constrained to see 

universal salvation in universal disintegration— 
so-called national independence—society _ is 
being dissolved into its constituents. Out of 
this international chaos the thoughtlessly san- 
guine, overlooking the existence of class-disin- 
tegration, are inclined to predict the coming of 
national microcosms, in which order shall reign 
under shelter of stout circumvallations—cubic 
contentment, the ideal of the narrow mind 
obsessed by agoraphobia, by fear of the world- 
markets, and quite feasible too, if only the world 
were shaped like a sugar-box, four-square, more 
or less; but that it is not, and one cannot square 


57 


a circle. The earth will continue to be round, 
and to move round, and the only possible cosmos 
that will emerge from this chaos will be rather 
more than less round, rather more than less inter- 
national. 

It is important to realise all this in considering 
the question of art. Art is merely a reflection of 
life, a solidification of thought: its real divisions 
are latitudinal, horizontal, as are the real divi- 
sions of humanity. Art is international—never 
more palpably so than to-day; the lines that 
divide it run along international lines. The gulf 
that separates Sir Edward Poynter fromt Augus- 
tus John, or Bouguereau from Maurice Denis, is 
far wider than the distance from Vroubel, the 
Russian, to Guevara, the Chilian. The vertical 
mind, with its eyes fixed upon its own zenith, is 
naturally bewildered by a movement of life which 
assails it horizontally, and so, without warning. 
To such a mind an England able to acknow- 
ledge, to take another example, a Dicksee and 
a Phelan Gibb as members of the same profes- 
sion, disciples of the same muse, must appear 
as chaos, particularly if it views art through the 
microscope of a particular esthetic theory. For- 
tunately, art is not only a question of zesthetics, 
its bases lie far deeper. However, all these 
artists are theoreticians, and one will find that 
the great world of artists, poets, and musicians is 
divisible in theorists and “a-theorists ”—+.e., 
people who have a conscious theory and 
people who have none. /Poeta nascitur non fit; 
the a-theorist zascitwr, the theorist fi¢ and repre- 
sents the great majority. Style in art always 
depends on the survival of the “ fit-est,” which 
pun is as unpardonable as it is true. The born 


58 MODERN ART 


artist bursts through theory, and thus becomes 
the unconscious representative of a new one. 

As we look into the past we see that the vast 
majority belonged to that class of artist which 
contentedly worked upon a theory cut and 
dried. But there is a great difference between 
the past and us; the past, as soon as it worked 
on theories at all, was content, and, indeed, had 
to be so, with one or possibly two theories at a 
time. It worked away at and with such for 
centuries at first, then at least for a generation 
To-day art-theories sprout like mush- 
rooms, and the artist who would be modern at 
all costs must change his theories more often, 
perhaps, than he can afford to change his shirt. 
There is, however, another peculiarity about 
theories: like wars, they can be started at will, 
but they cannot so be stopped. Thus one may 
find an idea invented, maybe, in Egypt or Crete 
a score of centuries ago, still flourishing by the 
side or in conjunction with one born but yester- 
day. We no longer give our artists time to work 
their ideas out, any more than we allow our 
politicians to bring their political thought to a 
logical conclusion, or our scientists to continue 
courageously in the straight, humble paths they 
had begun to tread. We are in the habit of 
demanding from every one the qualities which he 
lacks, because we too quickly tire of the qualities 
he possesses. For example: if we were a little 
less impatient we should be pleased, here in 
England, to accept the still existing followers of 
Lord Leighton, if they were only as “ perfect” 
as he; and, on the other hand, we should com- 
plain that John was not sufficiently “ Johnish.” 
In other words, that the followers of one theory 
do not take sufficient pains to follow it out, and 
that the starter of another was apparently un- 
willing to ¢hink it out. 


OF SO, 


So modern art presents a bewildering spec- 
tacle of theories: some in their babbling infancy, 
some sicklied o’er with the pale cast of logic, 
others in their dotage, and but few in the proud 
self-sufficiency of health and strength. But 


when we leave theories and come to the 
“ Atheorists,” who correspond to the Agnostics 
in that they are more concerned with what they 
are doing than why they are doing it, we enter 
a different atmosphere. It is a positive delight 
for the unattached mind to wander through 
exhibitions, to venture upon an unexpected 
poster, to happen upon an illustration in a maga- 
zine, and so to receive the sudden knowledge 
that here, there, and anywhere may be a mind 
so filled with the beauty, the joy, the misery, the 
irony of life, and sufficiently skilled withal that 
it can put down its experience for others to see 
what it has seen, to feel what it has felt. Half 
the joy and satisfaction of such discoveries is 
their suddenness. A collection of masterpieces 
palls as much as a chamber of horrors; master- 
pieces, like criminals, do not naturally occur all 
together at the same time and place. Now art 
is, contrary to a widespread impression, by no 
means a homogeneous matter; not by any means 
merely “the sublime and beautiful”; or, if it is, 
we must extend the meaning of each to such 
capacity as to make definition meaningless. 
“The only criterion of a work of art is the unity 
of its means and aims. Where the aim is 
obscured or diverted by incompetence of crafts- 
manship, or where apparent craftsmanship hides 
the poverty of ideas or ideals, there is bad art.” 

Although very pleased with this definition of 
“good” and “bad” art, because the writer 
believes it to be his own, he must admit that it 
leaves things very much where they were before 
simply begging the question of “craftsmanship.” 
Watts many years ago is reported to have said 
about Sargent: “I think he is all wrong; I don't 
know, but I ¢hizk he is. We will leave it at 
that... .” In the same way Leighton judged 
Brangwyn, and Géréme, Millet. We shall see 


later whether there is any answer to this question — 


of competency ; meantime, we ought to discover 
first of all what the aims of pictorial art are. If 
modern pictorial art does not representa unity, 
what does its diversity consist of? In order to 


MODERN ART 59 


find an answer to this question, let us begin at 
the bottom, with the so-called inartistic. 

By some curious kink or twist which a mind 
contracts after a long experience of pictures, it 
becomes more and more impatient of prettiness, 
which is the first thing that attracts the inex- 
perienced, For all that the Christian world, or, 
rather, the world since Christianity, had to wait 
some seventeen hundred years for the discovery 
of the pretty. It made some erratic, spasmodic 
attempts ; one may come across a “ pretty ” face 
in an eleventh-century statue ; one may persuade 
oneself that here and there a sixteenth-century 
artist, such as Correggio, achieved the pretty. 
But prettiness is by a natural trick of the mind 
associated with “petitesse.” Burke demanded 
of beauty the qualities we associate to-day with 
mere prettiness. He thought that beauty must 
be “small, smooth, delicate and mild in colour.” 
Watteau was the only genius of prettiness; even 
his men are pretty without offence. Then 
with Boucher prettiness was introduced into 
the nude, which Watteau had avoided. David, 
with whom the nineteenth century opens, and 
who in his portraiture could be relentlessly ugly, 
sought even to endow his heroes and heroines 
with “statuesque ” prettiness—a truly impossible 
task. The idea of smoothness as a quality of 
beauty is intimately connected with the smooth, 
enamel-like quality of the canvases of David's 
period, and has remained as a true characteristic 
of all paintings which aim at classicity and pretti- 
ness. With the ideal of classicity closely allied 
is another form of “beauty,” namely, the un- 
draped or partly-draped figure, and it is to be 
observed that, in countries where people do not 
habitually go about without drapery, art and 
immorality were regarded as blood-relations ; 
and it is to be further observed that the great 
European remedy against the danger of immor- 
ality is the veil. We have come to be satisfied 
with the application of some form of covering. 


Hence, whilst Giorgione’s Venus may be con- 
demned as grossly immoral, the tights of the 
“ Principal Boy” are regarded as unexception- 
able. Such being the case, the artist can spice 
his confection of beauty with a flavour of 
“naughtiness,” to the satisfaction of a great 
section of the public and to the mortification of 
all the Old Masters, who did not know what 
naughtiness was any more than they could under- 
stand the pretty. They could be rude, gross, 
and highly immoral, but “naughtiness” was 
born under the periwig of the “Régence,” and 
the French are still the best “ exponents” of this 
cult. French naughtiness is never offensive, all 
other generally is. One cannot imagine a 
Frenchwoman being vulgar, any more than one 
can believe that a Watteau shepherdess could 
bring a breach of promise action. Be that as it 
may: art taken at its face—and figure—value, as 
understanded of the people, is either prettily, 
overtly 


”» 


smoothly, elegantly beautiful and 
“good,” or covertly naughty. The public are 
not zaturally attracted to any other kind of art 
unless there is some other external reason 
behind it. . 

This external and perhaps most powerful 
reason of attraction is “the story.” Ifa picture 
is neither pretty nor naughty, and if it does not 
tell a story, it has, in the opinion of the majority, 
no raison d’etre at all. At this point the “artis- 
tic” and the “inartistic” join issue; the story is 
precisely what the artistic will not have in art. 
They say that itis irrelevant. Before the middle 
of the seventeenth century, it would have been 
absurd to speak of a picture without a story; 
there was no such thing. A picture without a 
story would have seemed as useless to them as a 
story without a plot. What the Old Masters 
did was to apply their art to the telling of a story. 
This was not only their whim and fancy, but the 
whole foundation of their craft. Before the 
invention and popularisation of the printing- 


60 MODERN ART GAS 


press our ancestors were in the habit of reading 
pictures instead of books, and to this day a care- 
ful listener at the Royal Academy may satisfy 
himself that eight out of ten visitors go there in 
order to read the pictures; and the eight readers 
are quite as justified as the two spectators. For 
centuries the story-picturé was the only window 
through which the common people might obtain 
a view of the world beyond their noses; for un- 
told generations the vast majority had no other 
use for their eyes than to tell them what was 
good and desirable or bad and useless for their 
bodily needs. Had they not seen pictures, they 
would not have known anything of the world 
beyond. Has the position of the majority 
undergone a really fundamental change? What 
is the real difference? When a man is trained 
to see beyond his nose, owing to the leisure he 
obtains at the expense of the unfortunate nose- 
grinders, he makes a profession of it. And so 
the artist’s world is explained to the vulgar by 
professional lookers-at-pictures, who expound 
the meaning of art after the fashion of the Priest- 
hood—as if art were a sealed book. 

The public stand in nearly the same need of 
the picture as did their forbears in the days of 
Giotto—hence the success of the cinematograph. 
Whether the artist ought to tell a picture-story 
or not depends entirely on the nature of the story 
he wishes to tell, and the manner in which he 
“recites” it. If he cannot do better than the 
film, then obviously he néed not waste his time. 
But now our professional lookers-at-pictures 
seek to prove that Giotto was zoZ a story-teller, 
but an artist; that his “language” was directed 
by esthetics, and that he was inferior to his 
Byzantine predecessors because he was already 
beginning to put imitation before the “essen- 
tial”; the absolute. Indeed, they want us to 
believe that the Primitives were really greater 
artists than the Impressionists. That, I am 
sure, is a tremendous fallacy. 


Chapter ITI, 


HE “ Decorativeness” of the Primitive 
is ultimately owing to what we would 
call to-day a vulgar desire to impress 


“the Barbarians” by plentiful use of 


precious gold and expensive pigments; to naive 
if complex symbolism and conservative tradition 
—mellowed now and hallowed by the Ages. 
The Primitiveness of the Primitive is due to 
the fact that they saw not much more than their 
own public. Giotto’s xatural inclination would 
make him see in sheep what his fellows saw, 
namely, mutton; his Christianity would teach 
him to see in addition what his Byzantine fore- 
runners saw in them, namely, a symbol of Chris- 
tianity, and the recent and novel teaching of 
St. Francis would further induce him to regard 
these humble animals as “little brothers.” 
St. Francis, in fact, presented the world with a 
new pair of spectacles, and the changes we 
observe in the manner of visualisation are due 
not to an alteration of the eye, but to a change 
of spectacles presented to the artist and the rest 
of the world by a new thinker. It is well to 
remember that seeing, in the artistic sense, is 
mainly a question of such aids to vision. With- 
out metaphysical spectacles the eye sees only 
what is in front of its nose, only what is likely 
to serve the immediate needs, fears or pleasures 
of its owner; it is for mental distances and higher 
aims that the aforesaid spectacles become indis- 
pensable. In so far as artistic expression 1s 
concerned, there can be but little doubt that even 
the mosaicists of Ravenna would have preferred 
Sargent’s objective accuracy of vision to their 
own enthusiastically imitative inexactitude. At 
all events, Giotto was praised by Boccaccio 
because of his marvellous imitative powers, and 
Cennini, in the early fifteenth century, gives 
minute instructions how to imitate the texture of 
woollen material in mural decoration, thus 
clearly proving that the Primitives were as 


anxious to give an impression of nature as any 


“ Impressionist.” | 
There was, however, an enormous difference 
in the function of art. The artist in the early 


xD a ink 2: ane ae) = ee 


MODERN ART 61 


days had an acknowledged and obviously impor- 
tant task; to him painting was the observance 
of a religious duty, intimately connected with 
the exercise of his craft. His business was the 
telling of sacred stories. In a world which took 
religion seriously, the painter of such subjects 
naturally occupied the highest place in his own 
particular hierarchy, but when religion began to 
be looked upon as an instrument for the better 
ruling of the masses and “the New Learning” 
had usurped its earlier place, even then story- 
telling still remained the artist’s main duty, the 
only difference being that “ esthetics ” were now 
applied to that purpose. How the art of story- 
telling by pictorial means had declined by the 
beginning of the nineteenth century is well 
shown, for example, by the fact that Baron Cros 
could quite seriously invite the public to be 
interested in such a subject as his: 

“Eleazar prefers Death to the crime of 
Violating the Law by the eating of for- 
bidden food.” 

He makes this old /ewish legend the plot of 

a classic drama for the delectation of a modern 
semi-demi Christian public. But it is to be 
observed that the most violent opponent of 
classicism, Delacroix, only arrived at a different 
conception of art by his passion for story-telling. 
Delacroix wanted to make the lot more 
dramatic, more relevant. In “ The Barricades” 
he even became political. As a matter of fact, 
since Hogarth painting has gained a new and 
important function, partly fulfilling the duties of 
religious art. With Hogarth it became critical of 
life, and in this its critical faculty maintains a 
far more vital connection with life than in any 
other; it still remains the power of influencing 
conduct. Such pictures as Ford Madox Brown’s 
“Work,” or Millet’s “Man with the Hoe,” are 
instances of vital criticisms of life expressed in 
terms of art. The artist who produces work of 
such kind needs to be more than sensible of 
“beauty,” and hence is frequently unrecognised 
as an artist by his “Brother-Brushes,’ who 


prefer to spend their time in invention or solu- 
tion of purely esthetic problems. 

The tendency of artists is like the tendency 
of the majority in that respect; the majority 
of people prefer to follow the line of least resist- 
ance, to swim with the stream. 

Hence it happens that most artists only skim 
the surface of their element, seeking to attract 
by superficial qualities; in other words, to paint 
like some other living or dead master. 

This brings us to the next aim in art. In the 
first instance, it was surface prettiness; in the 
second, the telling of a story which might be 
religious, like Fra Angelico’s, or mythological 
like Poussin’s, or critical like Hogarth’s, or 
literary like Delacroix’s. This latter painter 
happened to see one of Constable’s pictures. 
Constable is, however, remarkable: for the fact 
that with him art had no “story”; he was 
anxious to reproduce phenomena of nature on 
canvas. He wished to improve upon the 
methods of those old Dutch painters, who also 
only saw and painted without ulterior motives, 


the laws of harmony and composition, which 


they incidentally observed being comparable 
rather to the architect’s science than the philo- 
sopher’s speculation. In the course of his 
studies, Constable hit upon a new manner of 
technique. He painted with extraordinarily fat 
and riotous “brushing” and impasto. That 
suited Delacroix’s temperament; he copied 
Constable’s surface quality, and thus introduced 
into art a new and highly-technical interest. 
Whilst the public continued to look into pictures 
and tried to enjoy the plot, the artist was think- 
ing of technique. Then came Turner, with his 
“Snowstorm,” and the public saw only “soap- 
suds and whitewash,” and so became gradually 
used to pictures that were expressed in such a 
manner as to be unintelligible to them. Art 
required interpretation, and it has more or less 
required it ever since. It so happened, how- 
ever, that that branch of art which ought not to 
have required any interpretation of any kind, 


62 MODERN ART 


needed it most. The Impressionists, whose 
pictures were for the most part entirely innocent 
of plot, but consisted in scrupulous “imitation ” 
of nature, seemed least intelligible, because the 
Impressionists had eliminated “line,” which is 
to the naive intellect what colour is to the 
emotion, and what a crutch is to the lame. And 
it is precisely because through Constable line 
became, so to speak, superfluous, that colour 
assumed so great an importance in our day, to 
which it has become indispensable in the form 
of “pattern ”—1.e., an arrangement of colour- 
planes. 

The aim to produce, or rather to re-produce, 
emotion by means of “pattern” represents, like 
all the other aims, a long evolutionary pro- 
gress towards complete freedom of expression. 
Pattern releases the artist from the obligation to 
be interesting in his plot and “imitative ” in his 
representation. 

The artist can to-day, for the first time im 
history, say what he likes, and express it in any 
manner he chooses. What art is suffering from 
is the same as that which life is suffering from: 
it is just beginning to dawn upon the world that 
the limits set by ature to man are as nothing 
in comparison with the limits set by #zaz to man. 
At present there is chaos both in life and in art, 
“Chromocivilization and greedy Barbarism,” 
because we are in a complete muddle as regards 
the finding of rational means towards a desired 
end. 


Disgusted with the old formule of. art, © 


our more revolutionary artists are trying to 
invent new formule of their own, formule 
so different from unspectacled nature and 
spectacled art that they need commentaries, 
manifestoes, and all manner of explanatory 
notes. The aim is nevertheless clear; they 
wish to increase the expressiveness of art; the 
will is there, and the power, most likely, too; 
what seems to be wanting is, to borrow a word 
from present-day politics, a new orientation. 
Our artists do not yet realise what is and what 


is not to the purpose. Whilst they are feverishly 
experimenting with new building material, so to 
speak, they have completely forgotten the plans 
of their structures. 

They might, with advantage, take a hint from 
literature. The writer conceives an idea, but as 
soon as he wishes to express this idea he must 
select one of the recognised forms of expression. 
He cannot, for example, clothe Miltonian gran- 
deur in Gilbertian motley; nor is Mr. Dooley’s 
diction the best for a scientific treatise; nor 
Henry James’ for John Bull; neither would it be 
reasonable to demand that every piece of litera- 
ture should combine the qualities of Dante 
cum Shakespeare cum Goethe, because they are 
recognised as the greatest writers. Yet it was 
once demanded of pictorial art that it should 
combine the qualities of Raphael-Titian and 
Michelangelo, because they were the greatest 
artists. And to-day the different “sovements” 
in art are generally experiments in new combina- 
tions. Meantime, we are in danger of losing the 
plans! 

The painter or pictorial artist has three main 
“plans” to consider: Does he wish to paint 
prose, poetry, or decoration? If it is to be 
prose, what kind of prose is it to be—an imita- 
tion of nature, an illustration of a piece of litera- 
ture; a description of an incident, a “ critique” 
of life? In all such cases the interest of his art 
is without, not within. If it is imitation of 
nature, such as a portrait, faithfulness and 
accuracy are the principal duties; so also faith- 
fulness should be the principal duty of the illus- 
trator, where illustration is meant to amplify, 
not to beautify, the text. Finally, if the artist 
wishes to exert a critical faculty, he is under no 
obligation to make it “sublime,” but suffers no 
other limitation than the critic of life who uses 
his pen. He may, however, not wish to express 
himself in prose, being under the impression, as 
he most likely is, that art is essentially poetry. 
It includes far more than that, but at all events, if 
he regards it as poetry, he should treat it as such. 


a 


MODERN ART 63 


The mere fact of painting an orchard in spring- 
time will not make the picture a poetic expres- 
sion of “ Spring,” any more than calling the por- 
trait of a young girl “Sweet Seventeen” will 
turn the picture into the equivalent of a lyrical 
poem; or painting all the actors in a Corona- 
tion ceremony, from the king to the last page, 
will turn such a picture into an equivalent of a 
Coronation Ode. 
ject to the same law as literary expression ; prose 
defines, poetry suggests. 

Whatever their immediate purpose, the whole 
history of pictorial art shows that, consciously 
or subconsciously, artists have been trying to 
perfect themselves in two directions, viz., in 
the manner and in the form of pictorial 
expression. They have sought on the one 
hand to perfect their 
expression until it should amount to optical 
illusion, and almost, but not quite, part passu 
they have, on the other hand, endeavoured to 
use this power of optical illusion in such a way 
that it should express more than nature, 


Pictorial expression is sub- 


manner of visual 


namely, poetry, or the visualisation of emotion— 
a new thing, an addition to nature, as it were. 
But the history of pictorial art also proves con- 
clusively that they have not been clear as to the 
difference between manner and form of expres- 
sion. Form of expression until the nineteenth 
century was more or less epochal. We distin- 
guish between Gothic, Renaissance, Rococo, 
etc., forms. Manner, on the other hand, was 
personal, and we therefore speak of the Giot- 
tesque, the Michelangelesque, or the manners of 
Hogarth or Burne-Jones. In the last century, 
however, the distinctions between the two aims 
became blurred. We speak of Academic, 
Classic, Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, Impres- 
sionist, Post-Impressionist painting, but are not 
certain whether to call them manners or forms of 
expression, and find it difficult to classify certain 
artists’ work, such as Degas’s, for example, at all. 

The art of the nineteenth century is charac- 


terised by its tremendous variety of aims. The 
transition from one form-manner to the other was 
sometimes quite abrupt. David was a Neo- 
Classicist, but in his portraiture or in such pic- 
tures as “ Marat assassinated,” as naturalistic as 
Caravaggio and as passionate as Delacroix. 
copied pede Constable’s 
manner in order to apply it to his form of 
expression. Millais’s transition from the Pre- 
Raphaelite form-manner to the naturalistic 
manner was sudden. Such a volte-face was 
impossible to former ages. There is no differ- 
ence in the form or the manner in which Van 
Eyck paints “ God-Father” or “ Jodocus Viydt.” 
Diirer vainly tried to work in the Italian manner. 
Rembrandt uses the same formula for his 
portraits, for his religious and for his classical 
subjects, and never changed his manner through- 
out his life—only broadening it a little either 
intentionally or, what is more likely, through 
physical infirmity. Velasquez matured in 
manner so markedly that one might be inclined 
to believe that he changed his “style.” Never- 
theless, his form of expression did not change; 
his form of éxpression throughout his life was 
the same for all subjects. He treated a portrait 
as he treated the “ Surrender of Breda” and the 
“Forge of Vulcan.” Reynolds’s form-manner 
does not differ materially whether he paints a 
portrait or designs a stained-glass window. Yet 
it was in the eighteenth century that the first 
doubts began to arise. Diderot complains that 
Boucher’s Madonnas are not sufficiently reli- 
gious in treatment. When we come to Turner 
we find that his manner changes with the 
different forms he gives to his art; the evolution 
of his technique is not so much conditioned by a 
gradual improvement in visualisation, such as 
Velasquez’s, but by a successive change of direc- 


Delacroix stante 


tion or aim. 

But the first real inkling we get of the true 
relation between form and manner is through two 
Frenchmen—Puvis de Chavannes and Millet. 


~C. Maresco Pearce 


‘ 
a 


“Three Pines” 


A STUDY in tree character, confessing the good influence 
of Japan, Observe the consistency throughout, of — 
workmanship with decorative design. | 


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20 age ew is the dramatic moment before the “kill,” and one can 
- ; feel that the spectators hang in silence upon the result, = At a 


Ex teS 


SAT EN EE NT NA TET ER 


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ARTA un AM 


Plate L. 


G. L. Brockhurst 


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“Une Landaise” 


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4 Rigi work of a young painter who combines with remark- 
_ able success the virtues of Academic training with 
the more synthetic methods of modern art. 


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; . M* PRYSE pads a fopueatinn, with his bold work ‘ia 
lithography before he exhibited as a painter, His 

work is remarkable for dramatic composition and large, 

ees ay hk fluent drawing, as well as for the keen appréciation of 
sport expressed in it. 


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A PICTURE of singular power, in character, design, 
colour, and handling. The grouping well deserves 
the description of monumental, and the firm way in which 
the whole thing is constructed in paint atones for minor = 
defects of workmanship. — eh te Ge oy eae 


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Plate LIII. 


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Henri Martin 


‘THis is by ie Ginious Franch painter Sits decorated fe 
the Toulouse Capitole, | He is before everything | a 
painter of Summer and Autumn glow, able to suggest the — 
warmth as well as the illumination of reflected rays, 
Observe how the figures are not merely lit, but suffused | 
through and through with sunlight, With this command 
of light and colour, Henri ‘Martin pombines. reat ‘science — 
in decorative gerien: 


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The suggestion is that of an isolated existence in which | 
the primitive instincts and affections. have room to develop, 


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“merit of the picture is in its modest thoroughness Every- 

thing is carefully studied, but not laboured in execution % 


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Plate LVI. 


MODERN ART 6s 


Neither of these two painters was “imitative ” 
of nature—which they interpreted rather than 
copied. Millet’s manner was a sincere expres- 
sion of the form of his art. 
entirely personal, and consequently vigorously 
condemned by the academically-trained minds, 
who demand that the artist’s form and manner 
should be, if not traditional, at least realistic. 
Millet had one manner, but he also had only 
one form: he wrought a number of different 
pictures, figure as well as landscape subjects, 
but they were all elegies, all one type of expres- 
sion. Puvis de Chavannes painted a number 
of different subjects, but they were practically 
all conceived and treated as decoration. In both 
cases the relationship between the subject and 
its manner is intimate; in fact, inseparable. 
Whether that was mere accident, whether it 
was a mere chance, that prevented them from 
producing works to which their style was not 
fitted—though that seems unlikely at all events 
in Millet’s case—or not, the fact remains that 
the forms they chose and the manner they 
adapted to those forms of expression were logi- 
cally and inseparably one. On the principle 
“Le style cest homme,” it is generally, how- 
ever, assumed that the artist cannot help himself 
in the matter of manner, which is looked upon 
as natural to him. According to this theory, for 
example, everything that Leighton painted 
would look Leightonesque, just as Zuloaga is 
always Zuloaga, and Cézanne, Cézanne. It 
would be difficult to dispute this in Cézanne’s 
case, because Cézanne was so unskilled that he 
could not have had the faculty to change his 
manner, over which he had but limited control. 
In the case of Leighton or Zuloaga, there can be 
little doubt that they could change or have 
changed their mode of expression if they had 
seen any need for such a change. There are 
many Japanese painters of to-day who can paint 
either in the Eastern or the Western manner at 
will, and acquit themselves creditably in both. 
There is then a great difference between style 


It was as such 


and form-manner. Shakespeare had his own 
style, but the forms he adopted were in accord- 
ance with the period, and the manner he adopted 
was in accordance with the particular form 
selected as an expression of thought. 


Chapter III. 


N order to understand what is happening in 
modern art, t.e., the art of the twentieth 
century, it will serve a useful purpose to 
examine what has happened to a sincere 

artist such as William Strang. Strang has 
changed his manner repeatedly. One remem- 
bers works of his painted in a sort of Titianesque 
style reminiscent of Watts. One knows his 
Holbeinesque portraiture and his attempts at 
Hals’s technique. He has experimented in a 
manner which vaguely suggests a French origin, 
but is, I believe, his own; he has also painted 
pictures embracing certain types with which one 
has become familiar through Augustus John; his 
etchings show the influence of Goya, Legros, 
Diirer, and Rembrandt. First thoughts incline 
one to regard this fickleness as a sign of weak- 
ness, as a lack of artistic conviction; nevertheless 
the causes of this apparent fickleness are much 
deeper ones. Strang is typical of the whole 
tendency of modern art: he is searching for 
improved means of expression. 

If we regard modern art as a reflection of 
modern life, we may be justified in comparing its 
method with the hypothetical procedure of 
“Creative Evolution.” Modern art is feeling 
its way ; it is looking for something, the nearness 
of which it apprehends but has not yet completely 
discovered. Its duty is clear: it is there to 
reflect or express life. Its problem is always the 
same: to find the best means of doing so. The 
modern difficulty is the complexity of life’s prob- 
lems and the consequent complexity of art. 
Religion in the ecclesiastic formula of old will 


66 MODERN 


no longer do, because it no longer embraces the 
whole of human life from the cradle to beyond 
the grave. The classic Renaissance formula 
is too limited, too aloof, too aristocratic; 
the impressionistic, #.e., the scientific formula 
is too detached, too prosaic, too unemo- 
The art-force swings back in search of 
the emotional, and the world is surprised by 
extraordinary apparitions such as Picasso’s and 
Kandinsky’s “ Art,” an art which discards imita- 
tive representation altogether, seeking to substi- 
tute abstract forms and colour schemes, rather 
inciting the emotion directly through the eye in 
the manner of music, which incites emotion by 
direct appeal to the ear. Whether such a direct 
appeal is possible is another question, but what 
interests us here is the fact that Kandinsky 
demands for art absolute freedom in every 
respect. It is to be independent of a// fetters 
imposed upon it by “ representation”; it is to be 
dependent only on “inner necessity.” 

Now this is where Strang’s art becomes in- 
structive. It is quite manifest, for instance, that if 
Strang paints a portrait in the manner of Hol- 
bein, and another one deliberately in the manner 
of Rembrandt—whether he succeeds or not is 
quite immaterial—he is looking for a mode of 
expression. The /ovm of his picture is rigidly 
prescribed—it is an imitation of nature; the 
Manner is not prescribed, since one can paint 
portraits in Holbein’s, in Hals’s, or in dozens of 
other manners. But in theory at least one 


tional. 


manner must be the best; one manner must. 


either already exist, or may still have to be 
evolved, which will give the most perfect “ imita- 
tion” of a personality. There must be a 
“formula” for portraiture, and this I apprehend 
is what Strang and, with him, modern art is 
“after.” There is an “inner necessity” not in 
the subject (the painter) but in the object (the 
thing painted). That inner necessity is the 
exclusion from portraiture of all that is not a 
representation of a personality, and the emphasis 
on all that is. I have taken the case of por- 


¢ 


ART 


traiture, and Strang’s in particular, because it is 
comparatively simple and very instructive. Only 
the portrait painter himself can realise the difh- 
culties of a craft about which there is no 
fundamental dispute: artist and public are 
agreed that the best portrait is that which gives 
the best likeness of a personality, which is a 
little more than the likeness of a person. Now 
the vast majority of painters are far too busy with 
the technicalities of their craft to devote their 
energy to the painting of personality; they break 
down when they have achieved a tolerable imita- 
tion of the person. But even when they do 
possess the necessary energy it is a question 
whether they possess the insight. Watts had it, 
and failed as a craftsman, where Sargent, the 
craftsman par excellence, scarcely possesses it, 
and yet occasionally succeeds. That difficulty 
is inevitable, but the portrait painter’s craft is 
burdened with a lot of extraneous matter, 
because the inner necessity of portraiture has 
been obscured, so that the painter begins with an 
enormous handicap—he goes to work with a 
divided mind. He does not know where to place 
the emphasis, whether on reality or on imagina- 
tion, whether on the realistic or the esthetic aims 
of, not his own particular branch, but of art in 
general. He does not know whether he should 
falsify line like Raphael,* or harmonise “ colour ” 
like Titian, or render atmosphere like Velasquez, 
or dispense with it like Holbein; whether he 
should paint with diffused light like the great 
Spaniard, or with one concentrated light like the 
great Dutchman, or with two concentrated lights 
like Orpen, or with a bunch of different lights 
like Besnard. He is uncertain whether he 
should introduce Rigaud’s column and curtain 
props, or Gainsborough’s landscape dodge, or 
Van Eyck’s plain background, or Holbein’s 
interesting personal still-life miliew. Finally, he 
is inclined to add some irrelevant note of red or 
blue or green for the sake of picturesqueness, or 


* Though falsification is absent consistently from all Raphael’s 
portraiture. 


MODERN ART 67 


a Japanese curtain and a Spanish shawl for the 
sake of pattern. In short, he scarcely knows 
whether he is painting an optic experiment, a 
poem, or a decorative pattern. All these things 
are wholly irrelevant to portraiture, and the por- 
traitist’s first necessity is to rid himself of all 
superfluities. The only real problem is to find 
the right portrait formula, quite irrespective of 
esthetic considerations. Portraiture has an 
inner necessity of its own which seems to admit 
of only very limited interpretations. There are 
three formulz already in existence which it would 
be difficult to improve upon: Holbein’s, Velas- 
quez’ and Carriere’s. These three men were 
portrait painters sans phrase; so much so that 
they were painters of portraiture even where 
they should not have been. ‘This point takes 
us to the heart of the problem. 

Hitherto artists have been seeking for a for- 
mula that should cover ad/ the different branches 
of art. They, e.g., have not only painted portraits 
in a classical manner—they have adapted the 
classical manner to the painting of unclassical 
subjects, or classical subjects to the unclassical 
manner (compare Poussin’s “ Biblical scenes,” 
Rembrandt's “Ganymede,” and, in our own 
days, Slevoght’s “Penelope”). The formule 
they have hunted for have not been dictated by 
the inner necessity of the subject. That has 
happened because they have not been clear in 
their own minds about the different purposes 
which art may serve. 

Sickened with the imitative perfection of the 
film, they are seeking to-day for other forms of 
expression instead of going over the ground of 
art’s achievement and seeking to bring order into 
the chaos of already existing forms by deciding 
which in each case conforms best with the 
different substances of art. 

The need of to-day is not the invention of new 
means of expression any more than it is our need 
to invent new means of existence; our life and 
art problems are how to make use of the means 
we already possess in the most efficient manner, 


They made chairs very much like our own ten 
thousand years ago in Egypt; their way of chair- 
making has not yet come to be regarded as “ out 
of date,” nor, on the other hand, have we come to 
the conclusion that the Egyptian knew more 
about chair-making than we. That has happened 
because the Egyptian found the xe plus ultra 
in that respect; he found, or at all events used, 
the formula which we have not been able to 
improve upon. But he did not find the perfect 
formule for picture-making. That, however, 
is not to say that such formule will never 
be found. Formule for verse-making have 
been discovered, and re-discovered, and used by 
many poets of many races and of different ages, 
and the probability is that eventually formule 
for all things, including art, will be discovered 
from which mankind will not be able to depart 
with profit. 

Accordingly we may come to feel that all por- 
traits should be painted in “the” portrait- 
manner, after the example of the Chinese 
funeral portraiture, and that it is waste of time 
and energy to experiment with new formule if 
these do not constitute improvements on the old. 
Were the artist from his student days trained in 
such formule which the experience of the 
ages has shown to be the most effective, he 
would not be expected to make lyrics out of a 
personality with whom he is not united by ties of 
lyrical emotion, nor decorations out of unpliable 
because personal characteristics. That some- 
thing of this kind is felt by many modern 
painters is confirmed by the fact that artists who 
otherwise permit themselves perfect freedom and 
unconventionality of expression adopt a much 
less eccentric, a much more “ sober,” formula in 
their portrait-work; so much so that they seem 
to possess a dual personality. This dualism is 
due to the fact that in portraiture at least the 
artist can have no doubt that it is his duty to 
communicate with his public. He knows that a 
portrait is a means of communicating something, 
of conveying something; that, in fact, he is 


68 MODERN ART 


rendering a service. Yet he is ever distracted 
by his desire to disguise this service to man so 
that it may appear as an offering to the muse. 

The whole of modern art is permeated with 
this dualism, to the detriment of both public and 
artist. It is detrimental to the public because it 
has to take what it does not understand, and to 
the artist because he accustoms himself to the 
notion that he is a law unto himself, a self- 
ordained High Priest of the Art-Cult, respon- 
sible only to its “unknown God,” and thus is 
always able to shirk responsibilities by claiming 
“benefit of the clergy.” 

If one tries to discover what the “ High” 
artist, the man who, according to such a High 
Priest, is supposed to be creating im vacuo, is 
really occupied with, one finds that he is busy 
mainly with the vehicular qualities of art; he has 
no new message to convey, nor is he, as the 
earlier Christian artists were, the propagator of a 
new faith. On the contrary, he repeats, generally 
without sympathy, all the old, old stories, only 
in a new, or supposedly new, manner. He 
goes for what he calls “ the essential” of repre- 
sentation: for example, “the tree-ness of tree” 
or the horsiness of a “rocking-horse.” By such 
phrases he means to convey his conviction that a 
tree has its own significance, and that a rocking- 
horse, lacking, as it does, all the accidents of 
natural birth, is more essentially a representation 
of all natural-born horses combined; because it 
bears only the marks which make it recognisable 
as a horse. , 
carries, but it does not carry us very far. The 
meaning of all art is absolutely dependent on 
associations of ideas. A thing painted or carved 
is beautiful or ugly, true or false, well done or 
ill done, only in reference to the association of 
ideas it evokes. The tree has in itself,no signi- 
ficance, or, if it has, its own significance is inevi- 
tably hidden from our view; it must signify 
something to ws, or it signifies nothing. Simi- 
larly, there may be occasions on which a rocking- 
horse will be quite sufficiently representative of 


That is quite useful as far as it . 


a horse, but the test is not the manner of 
representation, but the occasion, or the purpose 
which the representation is intended to serve. 
Simplification—z.e., freedom from the tyranny of 
minute realism which was once considered essen- 
tial—is an admirable and commendable aim, so 
long as it does not itself amount to a new 
tyranny. 

But there are at present other “vacuum” 
artists who, as has already been pointed out, seek 
to do away with representation of reality entirely ; 
who seek in abstract forms and possibly colours 
the summits of art.. “ The idea of a circle—how 
beautiful it is,” a very well-known and very 
“modern” poet once said to me. But the idea 
of a circle is the idea of a self-devouring rhythm, 
void of hope, change or expectation; an empty 
circus for the empty mind. Such ideas without 
association, if they exist at all, belong to mathe- 
matics, not to art; and theories based on specu- 
lation of abstract forms and colours belong to 
psycopathy. 
everything in it is a near relation to the poor Ego 
which considers itself absolute. It is not the thing 
that is created—by God or man, if man may be 
said to create at all—which counts, but the 
impression it makes upon us, the ideas it 
suggests. 

One may, I think, safely leave the.“ vacuum ” 
poets and artists to their splendid isolation, with- 
out detriment to a proper diagnosis of art, since 
the real significance—or, more fittingly and 
humbly expressed, its relative significance— 
relative to man and his society is the newly 
manifest searching after order. The Impres- 
sionists taught us to see synthetically, previous 
ages having taught our eyes to distinguish analy- 
tically, We have now obtained visual liberty, 
and the question which rages around liberty of 
every kind is: What is to be done with it? 
That really is the question; so that the problem 
of art resolves itself into a question of meanings 
rather than means, 


Ours is a relative world, and 


MODERN ART 69 


Chapter IV. 


F there is any truth in what has been said 
before about the phrasing of portraiture, 
then a similar revision of phrasing will have 
to take place in the other branches of art. 

It was already suggested that art is not only 
poetry; it also embraces prose, and not only 
prose, but also decoration, that is, an embellish- 
ment of prosaic concrete realities—wood and 
plaster, stones and iron. 

Considered as prose, it has its purpose outside 
art; considered as poetry, it has its purpose 
within; considered as decoration, it applies this 
inner purpose to use. The divisions are clear 
and unmistakable. They are only blurred to 
our eyes because over all modern art hangs the 
cobweb of zsthetics. Let us take an example. 

In modern exhibitions there are always a great 
many subject-pictures of which it is impossible to 
say for what purpose they were painted; but we 
will choose an instance from a recent academy. 
It was a picture of Belgian refugees, and, so far 
as technical qualities are concerned, very ably 
painted. What is the possible purpose of such 
a painting? It was evidently not meant to be a 
mere statement of fact; the artist was not 
interested in the particular individuals repre- 
sented, nor did he expect the public to regard 
the picture as a sort of snapshot in natural 
colours. Was it then conceived as a decoration? 
Possibly, because it was painted “with an eye 
to colour,” such as would scarcely have occurred 
in reality. It was also deliberately composed; 
in other words, the artist had duly considered 
esthetic laws. But decoration, properly under- 
stood, is always “applied” to something, and 
this picture had neither the size nor the breadth 
which we have come to expect from wall-decora- 
tion. It was quite manifestly conceived as an 
easel picture. There is, then, only one other 
possibility: the picture was intended to be 
poetic; it was a “Belgian Lament.” The 
refugees were shown in the act of taking flight; 


their hearts would be full of anger, since their 
movement shows that they had not yet been 
overcome with despair. 

Movement, haste, anger and stupefaction, fear 
and desolation, those are the emotional qualities 
which the picture should have expressed, even 
in “ pattern,” and no doubt would have expressed 
but for the fact that the artist was all the time 
thinking, not of refugees, but of esthetics. 

Against this it may possibly be urged by the 
artist that he saw his subject “like that,’* and 
that the refugees did not show any of these 
things in their faces or their actions to a greater 
degree than he has shown. Quite possibly; but 
it is the business of the poet to intensify his 
soul’s experience by all the means he is capable 
of, and that which is called poetic licence is the 
licence to eliminate all things that are irrelevant 
to his purpose. Thereby alone does he justify 
his existence. 

Now this is precisely the aim of many of the 
younger and more revolutionary artists. There 
is, for instance, such a picture as Kramer’s “ The 
Jew.” It strikes one as barbaric and uncouth 
in its simplicity, so thoroughly has the artist 
made use of elimination. The tragedy of 
Jewry, its isolation, its oppression, its patience in 
suffering, seem to be conveyed by the simplest 
possible means. The question which posterity 
will be able to judge better than ourselves is, 
however, whether such a picture as this is too 
bald an abstraction; whether it is sufficiently 
poetic; whether it does not indeed approach too 
nearly to mathematics. One can never judge 
how “ good” a thing is until one has seen some- 
thing better, and we are only just beginning to 
see the possibilities of a free pictorial art fettered 
only by zzer necessities. The enormous force 
of “inner necessity,” conceived objectively and 
not subjectively, may be illustrated by an 
example from the art of writing. An author 
conceives the idea for a play; he creates his 

* I have seen a snapshot of spectators at a ‘* Tragedy of the Sea,” 


the capsizing of a boat. None of these show the remotest outward sign 
of the emotion that stirred them. 


70 MODERN ART 


dramatis persona, and the plot makes it neces- 
sary that one of his “characters” should act in 
a certain way in a certain situation. When the 
author comes to work it out, he finds that the 
“character” which he himself has created 
would and could not do in life what he wants 
him to do for the sake of the plot. If he forces 
this dramatis persona to act as he would not 
act, for the sake of the plot, he offends against 
the inner necessity of the character. If he per- 
mits his creature to act in accordance with its 
character, he offends against the inner necessity 
of the plot. A compromise is impossible. The 
author must either change his character if the 
play depends on the plot, or allow his characters 
to work out the plot if the play depends on a 
study of characters. In its application to art this 
means that the artist as the author of his work 
must be quite clear in his own mind what he 
wishes to create; whether it is to be a study of 
fact, of fancy, or of applied fancy, z.e., decora- 
tion. Having done so, he must bring the inner 
necessity of form into complete agreement with 
the inner necessity of manner. 

As we are at present in a transition stage, our 
pictorial art abounds with works produced with- 
out such zzmzer harmony, amounting in many 
cases to a complete obfuscation of purpose. 

Since the nineteenth century has enabled us 
to “imitate” nature more faithfully and less 
laboriously than any other earlier age, there is 
now but little excuse for mere representation, 
unless such is desired for a special purpose. 
An artist may be required to paint an “ interior ” 
or a certain “view.” That is pure prose. The 
artist cannot permit himself any poetic licence 
without deviating from the truth, and therefore 
discrediting his record; but he can either treat it 
synthetically, laying emphasis on the general 
impression, or he can treat it azalytically, laying 
emphasis on the variety of different objects 
before his eyes, “ according to order.” But the 
majority of landscapes and interiors one comes 
across in exhibitions are manifestly a compromise 


between pure imitation and esthetics; many pic- 
tures have nothing to recommend them but the 
skill with which the artist has rendered “ atmos- 
phere.” This is the aftermath of Impressionism. 
Monet was justified in painting one and the same 
haystack some eighty times, because he was not 
so much an artist as the discoverer of a new 
method of visualisation, a mastery of the air. 
Looping the loop is also evidence of perfect 
mastery of that element. But a master of the air 
does not therefore devote all his time to looping 
the loop for the benefit of the public; he has. 
other objects in view, and in any case the public 
tire of a feat, however skilful, once it is no longer 
unprecedented. 

As has already been pointed out, there are 
three, and only three, different ways of using 
art, viz.: for purposes of prose, of poetry, and of 
decoration, Each of these has its own laws 
of “inner necessity,” and it is the business of the 
modern artist to obey these laws rather than to 
follow schools of arbitrary zesthetics, such as 
Classicism, Primitivism, Cubism, or any other 
such purely academic conventions. The fault of 
the academic formula, whatever its particular 
complexion, is its rigidity, as we see clearly 
enough when we look at “old-fashioned” pictures. 
The academic mind sees everything in the same 
light. It decrees that prose, poetry and decora- 
tion should be painted in one and the same way. 
That is degrading art to the limits of a bugle, 
with which we can only create a certain number 
of sounds, and from which we can only get 
variety by transposition and “time.” Art is a 
much finer, a much more sensitive instrument, 
comparable rather to the violin, with which much 
depends on the instrument, but more on the 
player. For all that, however, the violin has its 
laws, against which even the greatest master 


_ dare not offend. Yet much of modern art seems 


to owe its origin to the sort of confidence which 
inspired that Yankee who was asked whether he 
could play the violin, and who replied: “I don’t 
know; I'll try.” 


MODERN ART 71 


Impressionism and the whole school of 
visualisation that dispenses with contours is a 
great pitfall to the tyro, who perceives how easily 
“artistic effects” may be obtained, and imagines 
that spontaneity mattérs more than assiduity. 
He is apt to look upon “finish” as mere pedan- 
try, with the result that he perpetrates or con- 
dones sheer incompetence, and is inclined to see 
intention where there is physical defect or 
absence of skill. In this manner the defects of 
the “Primitives” are exalted into qualities, and 
men with a kink, like El Greco, Blake, Cézanne, 
imitated in their imperfections. In result this is 
ultimately exactly the same as the effect of 
admiring and copying the “perfection” of 
Raphael or Michelangelo, because such adula- 
tion disregards the “inner necessity.” It is the 
“inner necessity” that drives the true poet, the 
true painter, the true composer, to utterance; it 
is the categorical imperative of his own particu- 
lar nature. The outward form of expression can 
never be copied unless the “inner necessity ” is 
the same, which it of course never is. But the 
practice of art has technical difficulties of which 
neither literature nor poetry knows anything. 
For this reason it were admirable if painters were 
forced into apprenticeships; if no one were 
allowed to ply the trade and profession of an 
artist until he had given proof that he had mas- 
tered, not this or that “perfection,” but the rudi- 
ments of his craft; had shown that he could paint 
decent impersonal prose, and knew how to apply 
this prose-knowledge to the purposes of poetry 
and decoration. That is what William Morris 
meant when he desired “a new art of conscious 
intelligence.” This would be a ew art indeed, 
because the old masters were bound by their 
tradition. The Renaissance began to seek for 
freedom of expression, but it was not till the 
nineteenth century, with its bewildering mass of 
new “isms,” that actual freedom became a possi- 
bility. Conscious intelligence tells the modern 
painter that there are many ways of painting, but 
that none will serve all purposes equally well. 


How much consciousness of purpose has been 
lacking might be illustrated by almost endless 
examples, but one will suffice to show that unity 
of means and aim as the only criterion of art is 
barely recognised, even by the eminent. 

Whistler, if any one, was a poet in pig- 
ments.. His painting owes its origin not only to 
poetic feeling, as his own written account of his 
inspiration proves; he was, unlike Rossetti, 
whose painting is sheer literary poetry, also a 
colour-poet. In his poems the landscape 
happens; its topography is merely an excuse for 
the unveiling of his feeling. His sentiment was 
roused by the beauty of atmospheric effects. In 
his portraiture he once or twice went so far as to 
leave out the features, so that the public might 
see his “poem” rather than his portraiture. In 
both cases there is a striking disunity between 
aims and means. Whistler saw not only atmos- 
phere, he saw also pattern. Pattern is a decora- 
tive quality, and a very two-dimensional one, 
whilst nothing could serve the purposes of the 
third dimension more faithfully than atmospheric 
colour. Its very essence is the suggestion of 
depth. Consequently we have in such pictures 
“A variation in violet and green,” or even in “ Car- 
lyle ” a record of disunion. Prose (portraiture) 
is here elevated into poetry, but the pattern, con- 
ceived by Whistler always as part of the surface, 
allies this poetry to “decoration.” Of his land- 
scapes Whistler said at the famous Ruskin trial : 
“TI have perhaps meant rather to indicate an 
artistic interest alone in the work, divesting the 
picture from any outside sort of interest which 
might have been otherwise attached to it. It is 
an arrangement of line, form, and colour first, 
and I make use of any incident of it which shall 
bring about a symmetrical result.” His portraits 
were also regarded by him as poetry. “Take 
the portrait of my mother exhibited at the Royal 
Academy as ‘an arrangement in grey and black.’ 
Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting 
as a picture of my mother; but what can or 
ought the public to care about the identity of 


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wes ‘the effect being got out of the material—as indeed 


Plate LVII. 


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Plate LVII. 


W. Lee Hankey 


HE resources of dry-point are here displayed in the 

strong contrast: of tone; a contrast that is yet 

without harshness, thanks to the velvety quality of the 
darks produced in this medium. 


Plate LVIII. 


Plate LVIII. 


Plate LIX. 


Augustus John 
"The Hawker’s Van” 


N epitome of the life of the road in terms of etching by 

a man who sympathetically understands both the life 

and the medium. For not less remarkable than the 

technical qualities of economy and precision is the feeling 
of weather and the suggestion of being “ at large.”’ 


Plate LIX. 


(G. Spencer Pryse 
‘An Episode” 


STUDY in romance, full of the inarticulate aspirations 

of youth. In its emotional effect it might be compared 
to a ‘‘ Nocturne ’”’ by Chopin—and indeed the tones have 
a musical value. 


Pinter ies. 


Plate LX. 


Plate LXI. 


Ambrose MacEvoy 


ERELY from the point of view of brush-drawing this 

would be a remarkable picture. It is done in a style 

that might almost be called ‘ calligraphic,’’ as if the artist 

had written his impressions; and yet nothing is lost of the 
delicacy of the model. 


Plate LXI. 


Plate LXII. 


Eduardo Chicharro 
“The Hunchback ” 


OTH in subject and in treatment this picture is thoroughly 
characteristic of Spain. Velazquez was fond of painting 
dwarfs, and to his influence may be attributed the breadth 
of arrangement and handling. The absorption of the 
figures in the music gives emotional unity to the scene. 


Plate LXII. 


Plate LXIII. 


Frank Potter 


“The Monument, 
Early Morning ” 


HE value of silhouettes is here thoroughly appreciated. 

It records a moment in which the buildings of London 

become a frame to a sky of almost unbearable purity. At 

such a moment the Monument seems to symbolize the 
dignity of commerce, and to be a monitor, 


2 ARCA. Spe 


Plate LXIII, 


Plate LXIV. 


Ignacio Zuloaga 


N its gravity and restrained wildness this picture might 
almost be called ‘“‘ The Soul of Spain.’’ The gipsy type 
accords well with the untamed character of the landscape. 
Everything is very still, but with the suggestion of volcanic 
forces below. 


Plate LXIV. 


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MODERN ART 73 


the portrait.” This characterises Whistler’s 
attitude towards his art perfectly, and is its justi- 
fication and at the same time a judgment pro- 
nounced upon it. One must remember that at 
the Ruskin trial Whistler had explained, refer- 
ring in particular to his exhibits: “ All these 
works are impressions of my own. I make them 
my study. I suppose them to appeal to none 
but those who may understand the technical 
matter.” With Whistler art had become self- 
purpose. In other words, he found it impossible 
to unite the inner necessity of meaning with the 
inner necessity of manner; and as he put his art 
before all he would sacrifice “imitation” where 
imitation is essential. Neither the pattern of his 
mother’s portrait nor that of Carlyle’s helps to 
explain the personality of his sitters—as, for 
example, the pattern of Hals’s “ Warrior,” Velas- 
quez’ “Del Burro,” or Rodin’s “ Balzac” helps 
to explain the personality of their originals. The 
very fact that he did not feel the incongruity of 
calling his mother’s portrait an “arrangement” 
shows that he was unconscious of an inner neces- 
sity—outside art. 

The portrait was not the raison d’étre of his 
portraiture. Then why paint portraits? Why 
not make a “poem” out of stuff that is more 
pliable, and would consequently yield a still more 
“poetic” result? In the case of the nocturnes 
and variations Whistler had adopted certain 
Japanese ideas, but he did not realise that the 
Japanese use of pattern is in strict opposition to 
his own use of tone in the atmospheric sense. 
Atmosphere is like incense; it envelops our 
mind and leads it away into distances of expecta- 
tion or remembrance, and so induces always a 
passive quality of mind in the spectator. Pattern 
saute aux yeux is essentially the here and now. 
One can recreate by pattern almost any state of 
the mind that is definite, because pattern itself is 
the essence of definition. Whoever looks at 
Whistler’s “ nocturnes” with an unbiased mind 
will realise that the Japanese pattern-element 
with which he invested some of them is always a 


hindrance to the very condition of mind which 
he wished to evoke. The little marginal sprigs 
of foliage seem irrelevantly playful, the Whist- 
lerian “butterfly-monogram” an intrusion that 
no one would have more resented than the artist 
himself had it been another’s. The very form of 
Japanese composition which allows the interest 
of the subject to be divided so that one part 
appears near the top and the other part near the 
bottom margin is incompatible with atmospheric 
vision. The Japanese picture has no cubic 
measure, and consequently no weight. The 
Japanese artist can therefore suspend his com- 
position from the top, and allow it to lose itself 
before it reaches the bottom, or find itself again, 
as he chooses. Our European method of com- 
position—the famous “pyramid” proves it—is 
always felt as an actual structure resting on its 
base. Whistler was at cross-purposes with his 
own formula, and accordingly his greatness 
speaks more clearly in such pictures as “The 
Little Rose of Lyme Regis ” and “ The Thames 
in Ice,” because they show a greater unity of 
means and aims than any of the subjects con- 
sciously created 2 la /aponaise. ‘Their inner 
balance is unspoilt. 

It was necessary to devote somewhat more 
space to the consideration of Whistler’s attitude 
because he is largely, albeit quite innocently, 
responsible for the mass of poor, unfledged art 
with which exhibitions have since been filled. 
Whistler, far from being a Primitive Methodist, 
was nevertheless a keen Protestant, a reformer 
of the old faith in beauty. His slightness, so 
much complained of as lack of finish during his 
lifetime, was not due to lack of knowledge; it was 
at worst occasionally a perhaps mistaken method 
of protest. His emphasis on the poetry of his 
art—toujours la poésie—gave rise to the 
“reenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery” zstheti- 
cism, and helped, by way of reaction, to create 
a school of painting which emphasised every- 
thing that was loud, and startling, and ugly— 
jamais la poésie—borrowing from his spirit 
merely the audacity. 


74 MODERN ART 


But why should art be always poetry, or why 
should it never be poetry? ‘The conception of 
art as a unity is as much mistaken as a similar 
conception of literature, or music for that matter. 
Art, music and literature are means of communi- 
cating ideas. As the world of ideas is infinite, 
so also must their vehicles be infinite. Litera- 
ture, art, and even music, may be used for all 
sorts of purposes. Even music: a bugle-call is 
a mere communication; a hymn is intended to 
bow the soul in prayer; a waltz is the decoration 
of love’s ante-chamber; an opera is a romance 
intensified; a symphony is the soul of a story; 
in short, a piece of music that were nothing but 
music were sound signifying nothing. So also 
is art for art’s sake. Art is a means to an end, 
and not an end in itself. To concentrate on 
means with neglect of purpose is a futility only 
possible in art, because its practice involves a 
craftsmanship incomparably more difficult, and 
therefore fascinating, than the mere craftsman- 
ship of word or note writing. The poet may 
write— 

‘How green the grass is all around,” 
and in these few words “ paint” the milieu of an 
emotion. The painter essaying to picture “ how 
green the grass is all around” is tempted to 
become more interested in the plot of grass than 
in the plot of emotion. 

It is true that music may also be composed 
mainly for the purpose of surmounting technical 
difficulties, but no composer can win lasting 
fame by the exhibition of his technique, whereas 
the painter can send up his “ plot of grass ” and 
be sure of praise from critics on account of his 
marvellous capacity for painting “ greens.” 


It is against this tendency that the keenest of 


the moderns are revolting. It is against the mis- 
use of craftsmanship that their crudities are 
directed; it is their manner of protest. The 
danger of every protest, however, is that one 
may protest too much, thus forgetting the end in 
the battle of means. Craftsmanship in itself is 


of no value whatever; as a means to an end it is 


invaluable. What the majority of modern 
artists do not yet realise is this fundamental fact. 
They are still too fresh from the “conquest of 
the air” to appreciate the freedom it has won for 
art. They will eventually realise that it does 
not matter in what manner a thing is painted if it 
is the right, the fit manner for the purpose. 
They will change their manner according to 
their sabject, as some of them already do. 
Shakespeare did not paint every play with 
the same palette, nor every character with 
the same brush. We must have a much finer, 
a much more sensitive art than we have at 
present, an art of much higher “ conscious intelli- 
gence.” Camille Mauclair was still able to say: 
“With Corot the great principle of modern land- 
scape painting is established; the atmosphere 
becomes the essential and logical theme.” Asa 
matter of fact atmosphere is not a theme; it is 
a milieu, and not the cause of Corot’s poetry. 
Corot sometimes, by no means always, chose to 
paint poetry. For these poems he used delicate 
atmospheric effects as a means towards an end. 
But it is the composition together with the 
atmosphere which gives these pictures their 
poetic rhythm, and the little unhappy nymphs 
have danced into his canvases straight from 
Claude’s “heroic” scenery. Mauclair was 
speaking truly enough for his time, only we have 
now come to feel that to paint atmosphere as a 
“theme” is to serve salt as the ¢keme of an 
omelette. It may be objected, however, that 
atmosphere zs beautiful, and worth painting as 
such; but there: nothing in the world is in itself 
beautiful to Auman eyes, nor, for that matter, 
ugly. Ugliness and beauty owe their qualities to 
association. Beauty, however, is not aggressive, 
whilst ugliness is always offensive; it “rubs us 
up the wrong way.” ‘That of course is no reason 
why ugliness should be excluded as such from 
art. Its use gives the artist increased dramatic 
The only thing he should avoid is to 


powers. 


~be “ugly” without need, which is necessarily 


always more objectionable than the almost 


MODERN ART Ee 


equally reprehensible habit of being “ beautiful ” 
without need. Both are sins against inner 
necessity, committed by old and modern painters 
alike. Old masters tended to make terrible or 
solemn subjects ridiculous to our minds by insist- 
ence on some trivial ugliness of action that 
sounded an unwanted note of truth where all else 
was “beautiful ” or “sublime ” artificiality ; com- 
pare, for instance, Poussin’s “The Plague 
amongst the Philistines at Ashdod,” in the 
National Gallery. 

Most of those painters who consider them- 
selves truly modern seem as afraid of prettiness 
and beauty as if they were symptoms of the very 
plague itself. There are no restrictions imposed 
upon the artist, except the restrictions of inner 
necessity. Prettiness and detail-finish are in 
themselves no more blameworthy than coarseness 
and ugliness; all that matters is the inner har- 
mony of truth. Chaucer’s lines which portray 
“The Prioresse” are realistically, even prosai- 
cally, minute to an almost incredible degree— 

‘‘ Hir over lippe wyped she so clene 

That in her coppe was no ferthing sene 

Of grece, whan she dronken hadde hir draught...” 
—a description of Madame Eglantine done with 
Flaubert’s microscopic realism, and yet the unity 
of aims and means was so perfect in Chaucer 
that he was able to paint her personality as it 
were with one dash of the pencil— 


“’ And al was conscience and tendre herte.” 


That is art. We want to see art freed from all 
arbitrary restrictions, and we want the artist to 
learn how to express himself in different manners 
according to the necessity of his subject. We 
want to have pictures that will represent mean- 
ings and not mannerism. Let us have land- 
scapes that are views, or descriptions, or impres- 
sions, or elegies, or compositions; let us have 
portraits that are either pure prose, or lyric 
poems, or obviously paraphrases of personalities, 
or character-studies, or, frankly, caricatures. Let 
us have subjects with literary interest or with 
archeological interest, stated in good prose 


instead of bad poetry. Let us, too, have “eye- 
gays” as we have nosegays. Why not? Let us 
have any of the “isms,” even “cubism,” when 
they intensify the meaning; but we do not want 
“isms” for their own sake. We must cease from 
the pernicious habit of- subordinating every 
picture to zsthetic fashions, from demanding 
that every picture, 0 matter what the subject, 
should be decorative, axd poetic, and beautiful, 
and veal, and modern. 


‘ 


If that were done we 
should be spared the incongruities of our present 
style of criticism, which is generally devoted to 
the manner, the technique, in which a picture is 
painted. As the critique is intended for the 
benefit of the public, questions of technique are 
The public are less entitled to 
learn the technical details of picture-making than 
the technical details of “tank” or torpedo con- 
struction. Our technical criticism is a survival 
of the “ dilettante” and connoisseur’s habit. The 
public have no business behind the scenes. 


quite irrelevant. 


Shakespeare did not write for professors of litera- 
ture. 

The war has imposed on every nation through- 
out the world new problems of economy, and it 
is to be anticipated that the future will sweep 
away most of the unwonted exhibition poems 
(over two thousand annually alone at Burlington 
House). The artist will have to justify his 
existence. But how can he do so unless he can 
prove that his work is of ational importance? 
The stage-painter, the poster-artist, the social 
caricaturist and satirist, and the comic illustrator, 
all have their justification in the economy of the 
nation, though it is an astonishing thing that 
Hogarth’s country should be so poorly repre- 
sented in critical art. ; 

We have had our Rowlandsons and Leechs, 
and Keenes and Phil Mays, but social criticism 
has died out. The illustrators of Punch and 
nearly all their contemporaries still take art 
literally. They have no language of their own 
like Daumier, or Steinlen, or Forain, or Gulbran- 
son, or so many other continental cartoonists, 


76 MODERN ART 


whose very pencils are steepéd in satire and 
imagination. Our cartoonists must we read before 
we can understand. Our most successful illus- 
trators are Bairnsfather, who combines little art 
with much humour, and Heath Robinson, who is 
inclined to reverse the process. We have, with 
the possible exception of Dyson and a few 
“ Anons.” in unpopular papers, no equivalent to 
Raemaekers, politically, and our best carica- 
turists have foreign blood, such as the late 
Ospovat and the ever-amusingly intellectual 
“Max.” In these two of the most vital branches 
of art there is plenty of room at the top, but it 
needs men not only with ideas on life, but also 
on art. We could do with a few pictorial Shaws 
and Chestertons, and can only lament that Belloc 
is not an artist. 

As regards the poster, that new and extremely 
hopeful invention of the present, we are more 
fortunate. We have at least Brangwyn and 
Spencer Pryse, and a few others. Nor should 
we forget the splendid pioneer work done by the 
“Brothers Beggarstaff.” 

In the poster and the cartoon there is probably 
more vitality, more promise for the future, than 
in any other branch of art, except one, and that 
is decoration. Since the year of the Great 
Exhibition and the writings of Ruskin and 
Morris, decoration has received virtually a new 
significance. In former times it served to glorify 
the wealth of the Church or of princes, of aristo- 
crats and patricians. Its connection with wealth 
is therefore old; its relation to the common- 
wealth is new, and newer still is the recognition 
of its bearing upon common health and common 
happiness. By now the vast majority of the 
public have become accustomed to decorative 
schemes (their quality is another question) in 
their homes, in the streets, in public buildings; 
and though they may scarcely notice their 
presence, they would immediately become aware 
of their absence. The business of the artist- 
decorator is, however, not only to add more to 
the already existing schemes and details of 


decoration, but—making, as some of them 
recommend, a virtue of their craftsmanship fail- 
ings—once again, as in the other branches of art, 
to produce a greater harmony between aims and 
means. Stage-craft has taught us the emotional 
significance of “ interior decoration”; has indeed 
opened up possibilities that were never thought 
of before. The new method of building has 
further improved the possibilities of the decora- 
tor, so that we may say that so far as decoration 
is concerned the artist has chances which former 
ages could not dream of. When the world, after 
the war, has regained its equilibrium, there will 
be a demand for the decorator; a demand which 
we here in England will scarcely be able to meet, 
so little encouragement has been and is given 
to the decorative arts.*,. This is as regrettable 
as it is surprising, in view of the fact that it was 
England that gave the original impetus to the 
decorative art movement of the whole world. 
There is no country like England for ixdepen- 
dent thought in every branch of life; even the 
little Arts and Crafts Exhibition at Burlington 
House proved this. But we appear to be lacking 
in the capacity for concerted action and common 
enthusiasms. Morris vainly tried to kindle them 
to a flame, not so much in the people as the con- 
sumers, but in them as the producers. Hence his 
ideas fell on more fertile soil on the Continent, 
where the people are accustomed to common 
(i.e., State or Municipal) action more than we. 
Morris’s mind seems, however, to have had one 
great fault: it was academic; it preached art as 
a faith, sought to influence life by reforming art. 
Much of his truth was therefore wasted. It is, 
however lamentable, still a fact that all progress, 
all evolution in the sense of improvement, 
depends on purely rational development. _Irra- 
tional faith may help the individual over his 


own momentary difficulties, but it never helps 


society; on the contrary, time and again it has 


pe Tee eee 

* It must, however, be acknowledged that the War Government has 
had the good sense not only to employ ‘‘ Camouflage Artists,’ but also 
to commission artists to record their impressions of the fighting and the 
fighters, ¢.¢., Muirhead Bone and Francis Dodd, 


MODERN | ART 77 


let society down. Man is solitary only in his 
pain; he is social always in his joy. Decorative 
art is essentially joy. It is not a virtue; it is a 
necessity that always exists, however poor and 
false its complexion. Morris seemed to want 
to impose art as a duty upon the producer. 
Art as a duty is like morality under compulsion. 
Duty, the brazen-faced hypocrite, is a word 
that should be erased from the dictionary of 
thought. We must learn to act finely in life as 
well as in art from a sense of joy, of pleasure— 
car tel est notre plaisir. But how can one 
expect a worker to take pleasure in his work if 
it is wrought for a wage and not for his own 
benefit? The days of Corin are over: “Sir, I 
am a true labourer; I earn that I get, get that I 
wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happi- 
ness, glad of other men’s good, content with my 
harm, and the greatest of my pride is to see my 
ewes graze and my lambs suck.” The sting is 
in the “ my”; Corin now wants to own the lambs 
he tends. And should he not? 

If we look around to see where modern decora- 
tion finds its most vital expression, we discover 
indeed that it belongs to public places frequented 
by near relations to Corin; to the buildings that 
serve the workers, from the large “ store” to the 
“popular restaurant,” from the banks and ship- 
ping-offices to the theatres and cinemas, from the 
town-halls to the garden-cities. The patronage 
of Church and princes is fast disappearing; 
even the merchant-princes prefer to surround 
themselves with ready-made second-hand glory. 

Here, then, is the decorator’s chance. In the 
days of “pomp and circumstance” the decorator 
was bound to express riches. His duties were 
limited to a service of gorgeousness, from the 
Byzantine Basilica to the palace of Versailles. 
It was not until the eighteenth century that a 
subtler psychological function was introduced 
into the art of decoration. The ancient decora- 
tor’s duty was to introduce as much carving or 
gilt ornament, and to paint his wall-pictures as 


realistically as possible, no matter how allegori- 
cal or symbolical his subjects. Indeed, even 
Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s decorative notions 
were based on meaning rather than e/fect; they 
preferred designs because they belonged to the 
Quattrocento; because they were suitable to 
their temperament rather than to their age. 
Morris’s Pipeshop in his literary picture of the 
future resembles Sir Oliver Lodge’s “ spiritual ” 
cigars; both are signs of the mental economy of 
puzzled thinkers anxious to make “both ends 
meet,” the knowable with the unknowable. Such 
signs are never wanting where faith, busy with 
past or future, neglecting the here and now, rules 
over reason. The modern decorator’s conscious 
intelligence tends to make him consider the needs 
of the now, to concentrate on the inner necessity 
of the task immediately before him. A much 
subtler psychological interest is demanded of 
him than mere imitation or adaptation of the 
past. He must not only have a subject in keep- 
ing with the purpose of the building, and these 
purposes are far more various in these days than 
they have ever been before; he must carry out 
his design, composition, and colour-scheme in 
psychological harmony with the professed pur- 
pose of the building. The marvellous develop- 
ment of stage-craft, which to some extent re- 
places the function of art formerly filled by 
pageantry and masks, has substantially helped 
to make the existence of such a necessity clear. 
It is no longer a question of painting an easel- 
picture on a wall, such as may be seen in 
the decorations of the Royal Exchange, where 
only one or perhaps two are in themselves (if that 
is possible) mural decorations, but of inventing 
a scheme in harmony with the architecture and 
its purpose. As yet we can only see the begin- 
nings of such an awakening of conscious intelli- 
gence. In Brangwyn’s work, for example, and 
in the theatre and restaurant architecture and 
decoration on the Continent, and even in the 
laudable, if ridiculous, attempts at the Borough 
Polytechnic. 


78 MODERN ART 


The decorator’s craft is thus the noblest and 
possibly the most vital branch, as it is certainly 
the most difficult, of all art. Photography might 
conceivably take the place of portrait-painting ; 
historical subjects, and even poetical easel- 
picture painting, may conceivably be superseded 
by the arts of literature;* Keats is an arguable 
substitute for Burne-Jones, and Wordsworth for 
Constable; but there is no other art that could 
take the place of decoration, which properly 
understood includes all the arts without excep- 
tion. The true decorator should not only be 
architect and sculptor, he should be the poet of 
line and form, of light and colour, and able to 
put his genius into the service of use, than which 
there can be no harder discipline. Whistler, 
who did not possess that discipline, bent decora- 
tion to the service of poetry; he made Leland’s 
“peacock-room” an apotheosis of his own picture- 
poetry, cutting up in the process beautiful 
oriental carpets and Spanish leather, but leaving 
the architecture, which was admittedly “far from 
beautiful,” untouched—a truly amazing compro- 
mise in one whose whole life was dedicated to 
art without compromise. The true compromise 
would have been to adapt his painting to the 
architecture, such as he found it, or to refuse 
the job. Yet for all that it was one of the 
first examples of a modern artist carrying out a 
scheme of decoration on a psychological basis, 
1.é@., without reference to purely academico- 
historic ornamentation. 

The possibilities of decoration have indeed as 
yet scarcely been tapped—its most glorious 
future is assuredly still before it. What is true 
of this one branch of art is presumably true of 
the others, even though not all of them may 
survive in the forms we are at present accus- 
tomed to. 


In the past art happened; in the future it 


will be wrought with conscious intelligence. 
EE SRN EEL er ian Se: Deaths ae Ae Aa yi See Ne 
* “ Literature, a growth that has now overshadowed the fine arts, and 


seems as if it might in time almost supplant them.”—H. G, SP£ARING, 
M.A., The Childhood of Art, 


Instead of the present chaos and welter of con- 
flicting ideas, in which it is difficult to distinguish 
between means and meanings, artists will obey 
laws which will regulate expression without 
imposing fetters upon its real freedom, as the 
“rule of the road” regulates traffic, in the 
interests of communication. What at present is 
wrong with art is, as the foregoing pages tried 
to point out, the aimless seeking after new means 
and old meanings. Whilst the old-fashioned 
artist clings to his particular “ism ” from want of 
imagination or sheer inertia, the most “ad- 
vanced ” artist invents some new “ism ” after the 
example of the Teuton, who evolved a sublime 
camel out of his inner consciousness. 

When all is said, art is either a trade or pro- 
fession, like the plumber’s and carpenter’s or the 
reporter's and journalist’s; or it is a vocation 
like the poet’s. The trade or profession can be 
taught, learnt, acquired with more or less success 
by any one—the vocation is a calling, which only 
those who have been “ called” can practise with 
success. But they have to pass through the 
hardest school of all; they must, with every fibre 
of their body, with every vibration of their soul, 
live life and love life. 

So we come to the very trite, the very thread- 
bare, the very outworn conclusion that love, and 
love only, matters. 

Says Cennino Cennini in his second chapter: 
“There are some who follow the arts from 
poverty and necessity, also for gain and for love 
of the art; but those who pursue them from love 
of the art and true nobleness of mind are to be 
commended above all others.” 

Says Tolstoy: “The destiny of art in our 
time is to transmit from the realm of reason to 
the realm of feeling the truth that well-being for 
men consists in being united together, and to set 
up, in place of the existing reign of force, that 
Kingdom of God, z.e., love, which we all recog- 
nise to be the highest aim of human life.” 

The world after the war will become more than 
ever conscious that the greatest question in the 


MODERN ART 79 


world for the whole of humanity is the question of 
economy; and because we are only just begin- 
ning to realise that the “oikos” of humanity is 
the whole world. The perfect adjustment of 
means and ends, which is, and always has been, 
the great problem of all life and of all art, will 
be pursued with ever-increasing conscious in- 
telligence, to repeat William Morris’s phrase 
once more, because it is to him and Ruskin prin- 
cipally that we owe the knowledge of the intimate 
connection between social art and social welfare. 


Nothing could have brought home to us the 
interdependence of all things human like this 
war, and nothing could have helped so much as 
this tremendous universal sacrifice to confirm the 
majority in their claim to share in the good things 
of life. There will be a universal desire to 
improve the quality of life, and that cannot fail 
to bring about an improvement in the quality 
of art. | 

New scales are even now in the making, new 
weights will, without a doubt, be found. 


Plate LXV. 


Frank Brangwyn, A.R.A. 


‘Cannon Street Station” 


HIS is ‘‘ London,”’ essentially. The grimy grandeur of 
the scene is enhanced by strong contrasts of light and 
shade, and the little figures own the power of the tyrant 
city. Relief is given by the serene space of sky above 
the bridge. 


Plate LXV. 


Charles H. Shannon, A.R.A. 
“The Morning Toilet ” ) 


HE dangerous facility of lithography is here controlled 

by a sense of beauty and a sense of style. Even in 

black-and-white the rosy bloom of the nude body is suggested, 
as well as the quality of morning light. 


Plate LXVI. 


Plate LXVI. 


Plate LXVII. 


Will Dyson 


‘They were promised the earth, 
and are given potato tickets ” 


RAWN with the savage intensity of the born propa- 

gandist, whose pencil is a weapon. It is all the more 

impressive for lack of violent action, the effect being that 
of the lowering hush before the tempest. 


OWA Wawaied Hu tae case au a ent 


Plate LXVII. 


Plate LXVIII. 


Mare Henry Meunier 


‘The Chapel on 
the Wayside ” 


FINE example of decorative realism, recalling the 

more poetical of the pre-Raphaelites—Rossetti, for 
example—in the significance given to inanimate objects. 
All minor accidents of contour are eliminated, and the 
technique has a decorative value of its own. 


Plate LXVIII. 


Plate LXIX. 


Hippolyte Daeye 
Portrait of Child” 


ISS: on account of the great sympathy with 

which the medium—apparently charcoal—is handled. 
It is as if the artist were breathlessly eager to reproduce 
in his drawing the flower-like fragility of the model. 


poset Hisar EY gy 


Plate LXIX, 


Plate LXX. 


G. Covelli 
‘The Toilet” 


CLEVER study in artificial lighting, the subject being 

attractive by reason of its objective treatment. It 
is a note on ‘“ worldliness’’ by an amused but not 
unsympathetic observer. 


Plate LXX. 


Plate LXXI. 


William Orpen, A.R.A. 
* Kat” 


N its tact and economy, while giving a purely descriptive 
as distinct from an expressive rendering of the subject, _ 
this drawing recalls the work of Watteau. The frank 
‘‘ standing to be drawn ’’ attitude of the model is in itself 
an attraction. 


+ 


Plate LXXI. 


Plate LXXII. 


Ettore Tito 


* Autunno” 


BY a Venetian painter famous for the silvery quality of 

his aerial effects—apparent even in reproduction. 
Equally evident is a command of decorative design, in an 
easy, naturalistic manner. 


Plate LXXII. 


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